Ecce Veja, Dantas’ Inferno and Nassif’s Disbelief: “The Lords of Noise”

A consumer news medium in no culture or situation can declare its objectivity, fairness and communication integrity when gate-keeping decisions are influenced by factors that are unseen and unknown—such as occurs with “cash for news coverage.” This is especially true in societies that claim to be democratic and civil and humane. An attempt to present truth in a fair and objective manner and in a known context must be seen as a universal value when the value of truthfulness is declared, either explicitly or implicitly. — International Index of Bribery for News Coverage (2003)

A imprensa e o estilo Dantas: Veteran Brazilian business journalist Luis Nassif posts a new chapter to a series of close readings of Veja magazine (Editora Abril) that suggest it practices, to use a phrase we like to use in this column, the “art of the gabbling ratfink.”

(The term comes from the working vocabulary of Nixon dirty trickster Donald Segretti and has been bowdlerized for the family-oriented Internet.)

For hire. The chapter is titled something like “The Press and the Dantas Way of Business.” Very loosely.

After trying to establish a pattern of journalistic misconduct, Mr. Nassif now focuses on a specific target, a lobbyist-flack named Humberto Braz whom he accuses of orchestrating noise machine campaigns not unlike the “aluminum tubes” incident involving the New York Times‘ Judy Miller.

You remember that: Judy ran a story leaked to her by the Office of the Vice President, which the Veep then proceeded to cite it as though it were the product of independent information-gathering in order to get around official secrecy laws and promote the “Saddam has the bomb” meme on the Sunday network talk shows.

This is why I often propose we refer to anonymously sourced leak journalism as “Judy Millerism.”
See

• NMM(-TV)SNBCNNBS: Owning the Medium, Owning the Message, A How-To

Conforme fartamente demonstrado nos capítulos anteriores, antes de fechar com Dantas a direção da Veja o tinha em conta como alguém que comprava reportagens, fabricava dossiês falsos e subornava jornalistas.

As amply demonstrated in the preceding chapters, before closing a deal with Dantas, the editorial management of Veja knew the banker as someone who bought coverage, fabricated phony dossiers, and bribed journalists.

No capítulo “Os Primeiros Ataques a Dantas” e “O dossiê falso” esmiuço as sucessivas denúncias de Veja antes de ser cooptada pelo banqueiro. Qual a lógica que leva uma revista a se associar a um empresário que, segundo ela mesmo, espalha dossiês falsos, compra reportagens e jornalistas? Há muitas explicações para isso, nenhuma boa, do ponto de vista jornalístico.

In my chapters “The First Attacks on Dantas” and “The Phony Dossier,” I detail the series of accusations Veja made before being coopted by the banker. What is the logic that would lead a newsmagzine to align itself with a businessman who, according to its own reporting, distributes phony dossiers and buys coverage and journalists? There are many possible explanations, none of them [pretty], from the journalistic point of view.

“Churnalism”

Turtles all the way down: Malcolm McLaren ransom-note aesthetic enjoys revival in Blighty book design circles. Would somebody please smuggle this book to South America for me on the next packet steamer to Santos?

British journalism | Hacks at work | Economist.com: In the course of trying to document for a Metropolitan colleague the informal Colonial terms of art “hack” (journalist) and “flack” (public relations professional), conversation turns to whether the Economist is any good anymore (I hold my hand, palm down, parallel to the floor, and make the wiggling motion denoting ambivalence).

Which leads to this bit of doggerel:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to!

It’s a review of a book by Nick Davies of the U.K. Guardian called Flat Earth News.

The Economist manages not to mention the title of the book even once in its review.

The Economist apparently thinks the Five Ws are optional. The name of the book is not as important as what the Economist thinks of the book.

The title does appear in an associated “opportunity to buy” “related items” box on the Web page.

So NIRI and Yet So Far

“Sarbanes-Oxley inside!”

This comes to the e-mail inbox from the National Investor Relations Institute (which could really, really use a good copyeditor for its newsletter, by the way).

Too bad we are not in New York. This could be interesting. Seriously. It’s $50, but I bet I could gobble up at least that much in cocktail shrimp and gin.

While investors and analysts continue to rely on traditional print and broadcast media they are also becoming more “new media savvy,” presenting new challenges for the IR professional.

How will the ongoing and inexorable agglomeration of the Reuters-Thomson-NEWS-Dow infotainment complex affect your company’s never-ending battle against the gabbling ratfink and the churning of the rumor mills?

Result: While IROs need to continue to cater to the needs of the traditional media they must also understand how the recent acquisitions and mergers – such as News Corporation’s acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. (including The Wall Street Journal), and Thomson Corporation’s acquisition of Reuters Group PLC – will affect the journalists who cover their industry. IRO’s also need to closely follow Web-based reporting and blogs.

But only the blogs that people whose opinions matter are actually foolish enough to be reading instead of getting serious work done.

Tools For Translation Fools and the Tupi Tippee

For that reason, the management of a publicly traded company is not the only party prohibited from trading on privileged information. Also prohibited is the possession of this information by subordinates or [related parties], known as “tippees” in U.S. law, who receive the information from executives or other employees of the issuing company, as well as by third parties who recieve the information from various sources, including sources other than the issuing company and its management. Everyone who has had access to such information, knowing it to be material and nonpublic, are prohibited from making undue use of it. That is to say, even outsiders with no duty of loyalty to the company are barred from using privileged information on an issuer to trade in its securities, knowing this information to be material and confidential.

From a manual on disclosure standards and practices by ABRASCA — the principal association of publicly traded Brazilian companies, as far as I can tell.

The gimmick is that I translated the passage using WordFast 5.0, “the affordable altenative to Trados,” as it tends to generally market itself.

Former Soviet Georgia: “Mid-Election, The Regime Invites Rupert Murdoch to Own TV”

Murdoch takes to his airwaves to discuss the W$J deal during the Cavuto cavalcade of pumpery-dumpery on FOX News. Six minutes in, Cavuto says “I guess I oughta disclose that I am building a business channel for you.” In a deal in which journalistic integrity ostensibly loomed large, the moment constituted something of a double message, I thought.

Georgia: Vote 2008 Report Card (Eurasianet/Open Society Institute (Soros))measures promises made and promises kept in the (former Soviet) Georgian elections held today:

In an interview on the day of his resignation from the presidency to run for re-election, Mikheil Saakashvili indicates that Imedi Television, a pro-opposition station shut down in the wake of the November 7 unrest in Tbilisi, will be allowed to resume broadcasting if assurances are given “that there is no more threat that [former Imedi co-owner Badri] Patarkatsishvili will seek to enact a violent scenario through his dirty game and we have guarantees within the framework of the law that this will not happen.”

Was the promise kept?

Imedi TV returned to the airwaves on December 12, 2007. Television staff say that damage done to their equipment during the takeover means that they must limit their news broadcasts, however. Amidst the presidential campaign, questions about Badri Patarkatsishvili’s ownership stake appear to have dropped into the background. Nonetheless, with encouragement from the international community and government, a media council, chaired by Polish journalist Adam Michnik, has been set up to monitor and discuss Georgian TV broadcasts’ observance of professional ethics.

Have they done any work? The council has been described more specifically as a media monitoring mission on behalf of the European Union.

The partisan and ideological affinity of the Fox Network in the United States over the years, and its propensity for propaganda and fake news, is well known, but the quid pro quo was never quite as stark in that case as the government pressuring the shareholders to accept a a check for their stake in the entire network because some of them are unfriendly to the regime.

Will we see another drama of “the crusading journalist versus the crooked establishment,” as in Thailand? See

• Thailand: “Crusading Media Mogul Jailed For Publishing Nonexistent Facts”
• IHT ThaiDay: “Stop the Presses, The Presses Have Stopped”
• Thailand: The Rise and Fall of Sondhi and the Emergence of the Journalist-Camelô
• Thailand: “The Corrupt Media Mogul v. The Crusading Journalist”

What is Reporters without Borders — “Marcel Granier is a martyr to freedom!” — saying on the subject?

Daily Variety: The station was back off the air on December 27, 2007, after the government suggested that its legal status was “unclear” — and that Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to buy 100% of its shares(!).

News Corp. owns 51%, controls 49% with a 12-month power of attorney — the candidate put his media power in escrow, is that it? — and claims full operational control

Journalists at Imedi TV — the News Corp.-controlled independent channel in Georgia — took the station off the air Wednesday, citing official pressure and personal safety fears as tensions rose ahead of an early January snap presidential election in the Caucasian country.

“Lusitanian Bank Pulled a Fastow One on the Lusophone Financial Markets”: Luso-SEC

The Luso-SEC: Keeping careful count of the Lusitanian two-cow economy …

Enron capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three to your publicly traded company using credits issued by your brother-in-law. Then you swap debt for equity through an IPO so that you get all four cows back, with complete tax-exemption for the five cows that you now have. The rights to those six cows are transferred to a corporation in the Caymans whose secret majority shareholder is an Enron exec who sells the rights to those seven cows back to his own company. The annual report states that the company owns eight cows, with an option to buy one more. –See “The Entire Tupi-Lusitanian Shaggy-Dog Capitalism Joke”

Portuguese capitalism: You have two cows. You complain because your herd does not increase. —Ibid. (with apologies to my dear Portuguese friend Ângi for perpetuating bad, mildly insulting Tupi humor about the country from which Brazil is separated, as they say, by a common language. Personally, I heart Bortugow.)

“It is important that situations of uncertainty that might affect the value of the shares not be prolonged unreasonably,” said the CMVM president, just after yet another BCP shareholders meeting was delayed due to technology glitches that prevented shareholder votes on the controversial proposals of Jardim Gonçalves … from being counted.

Portugal Digital notes a development in the BCP case.

The commercial bank recently (December 24) underwent a clean-sweep of its former management, who are being investigated for various alleged shennanigans of a distinctly Andy-Fastovian flavor, judging from initial characterizations.

Thomson Financial/Forbes reported on December 28:

LISBON (Thomson Financial) – Portugal’s central bank said it has opened an investigation on Banco Comercial Portugues SA, regarding BCP’s links to 17 offshore companies, for which BCP failed to properly report its nature and activities. The Bank of Portugal and stock market regulator CMVM said previously they are conducting simultaneous investigations into alleged loan irregularities at BCP and its links to offshore companies, which allegedly bought BCP shares without proper reporting of the purchases.

Contrary to recent media reports:

The central bank said in a statement that contrary to recent media reports, its investigations are not due to facts already known and analysed in the past but stemmed from freshly received information.

PD around the same time:

Depois de longo silêncio, Banco de Portugal divulga comunicado sobre investigações ao BCP. O Banco de Portugal divulgou um comunicado sobre as investigações ao Banco Comercial Português (BCP), maior banco privado luso, que responde por cerca de 25 por cento do mercado financeiro do país.

After a long silence, Portugal’s central bank issued a press release on investigations into BCP … the nation’s largest private bank, which controls 25% of the nation’s financial market.

É a seguinte a “Nota de esclarecimento” do Banco de Portugal:

The press release follows:

Na sequência das averiguações em curso, o Banco de Portugal procedeu em 26 de Dezembro à abertura de um processo de contra-ordenação ao BCP e a membros dos seus órgãos sociais, com base em factos relacionados com 17 entidades off-shore cuja natureza e actividade foram sempre ocultadas pelo BCP ao Banco de Portugal, nomeadamente em anteriores inspecções.

In the course of ongoing investigations, the Bank of Portugal opened on December 26 a [misconduct] proceeding against BCP and members of its [board] based on facts related to 17 offshore entities whose nature and activities have been consistently concealed by BCP from the Banco de Portugal … in previous inspections.

Contra-ordenação:

Constitui contra-ordenação todo o facto ilícito e censurável que preencha um tipo legal no qual se comine uma coima. (Decreto-Lei n.º 433/82 de 27-10-1982)

Any illict and punishable act that may be subject to a fine.

I guess you could fake it and translate that as a “regulatory violation.”

São esses novos factos, apurados a partir de denúncia recente, que justificam toda a actuação que o Banco de Portugal tem conduzido sobre este assunto. Nesse sentido, esclarece-se que, contrariamente ao que tem sido referido, não é a reconsideração de factos conhecidos e analisados no passado que fundamenta a intervenção que o Banco agora desencadeou e que prosseguirá até ao completo apuramento das responsabilidades no presente caso.

These are new facts, discovered in the investigation of a charge recently received, which justify all the steps BP has taken with respect to this matter. In this respect, it should be clarified that, contrary to what has been reported, the Bank’s intervention was not based on a reconsideration of facts learned and investigated in the past, and its investigation will continue until all responsibilities in the present case have been clarified.

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

Some of the journalists on this list were paid off by Cedel. Under the headline “The bank that buys journalists,” the English satirical newspaper Punch revealed, in late 1997, that some of the journalists on this list, freelancing for such publications as the Financial Times, Euroweek, London Financial News and the International Financing Review, had received comfortable sums–Punch mentions a figure of 600,000 francs per year–in return for, among other things, criticizing Cedel’s competitor, Euroclear, and “building up the international profile” of Cedel’s CEO. –Robert & Backes, from Révélations, on bribery and cooption as a press relations strategy in the struggle for control of the Clearstream board. See Crooked Journos: Continental Precursors

MAM sera entendue comme témoin le 21 décembre: the trial of former French prime minister Villepin for conspiring to commit a felonious gabbling ratfink in the AFFAIRE CLEARSTREAM marches on.

Given that it involves the false imputation of bribe-taking and big, fat Swiss bank accounts to political enemies of a faction within the French government, as a part of the après-Chirac succession struggle, the case interests me.

It is also kind of in my old editorial beat, which included the clearing & settlement industry — although I mostly always just focused on the technology of automated beancounting, a much less dramatic, much nerdier subject.

For a general chronology of the case, see

• The Muddy Waters of Clearstream: A Gallic Chronology

It goes something like this:

[In Clearstream I] … judges received, from anonymous correspondents, lists on which figured the names of a number of political heavyweights (Nicolas Sarkozy, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, …), major business figures and even stars of show business (Laetitia Casta). All of them allegedly used the same financial utility, Clearstream, to receive their money. … The second phase of the inquiry, Clearstream II, was unleashed in 2004, when it emerged that the Clearstream I files were phony. A new inquiry was opened into “making of false charges.” Two new judges, d’Huy and Pons, were put in charge of the case. Their task is to answer the question: Who is seeking to heap opprobrium on [bork, ratfink, Segrettify, smear] these public figures?

We are watching a similar case in Brazil.

Bahia-born, MIT-trained investment banker and asset manager Daniel Dantas hired “global risk management firm” Kroll to prepare a similar dossier on government and police officials here in Brazil, and approached Veja magazine about publishing it.

Veja executive editor Márcio Aith flew to Zurich to meet with Kroll’s point man on the case, former CIA agent Frank Holder, in October 2005. All this by Veja‘s own account.

Veja magazine did publish the “dossier,” in May 2006, saying that, while it could not verify the authenticity of the documentary evidence underlying the charges — “It could well be a fraud” — it nevertheless found the charges plausible.

See

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

This is a rumor that Veja continues to monger. See

• Seen on “The Brazilian Letterman Show”: Diogo Mainardi on the Journalism of Buzz

In any event, from a journalistic point of view, the case highlights the risks of anonymous sourcing in reporting on scandalous stories. If you vouch for nonsense, you get a reputation for purveying nonsense.

And “toxic sludge is good for you” marketing of this approach to journalism cannot hold the reputational debacle you suffer for doing so at bay forever. Just ask Judy Miller.

(Veja‘s “exposé” on alleged payments to the Sex Senator‘s mistress by a lobbyist for a public-works contractor, for example, appears to have been based on a single source: The mistress’s palimony lawyer. The same lawyer reportedly also negotiated the mistress’s “tasteful,” “Monica bares all!” appearance in Veja‘s sister publication, Playboy Brasil. Veja did not identify its source. Ecce Veja. See

• Monicagate: The Sex Senator, The Globo Talking Head, the Palimony Lawyer, and Veja

The Nouvel Observateur notes that Chirac’s former Defense minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, currently Sarkozy’s minister of the Interior, will once again be called to testify in the case.

The background to that development is a note written by General Rondot, whose house was raided in 2006 as part of a search for “The Crow” — the anonymous source of forged Clearstream accounting records that implicated political enemies of Villepin and, among others, if I have this straight, the chairman of the Airbus consortium.

Rondot admitted to his part in cooking up the gabbling ratfink, and charged that Villepin put him up to it. Did Chirac put Villepin up to it?

That is the question that has the land of “cheese-eating surrrender monkeys” — a talking point promoted by Dubya supporters when the French government took the position that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were probably nothing but a mass distraction — all abuzz!

Gazeta: “Tupi Tech is a Nervous Wreck”

Will all subequatorial Cisco boxes go dark, bringing an abrupt and catastrophic end to the tropical Information Age? There are those who say so, but none of them seem willing to stake their credibility on the prediction by signing their name to it.

The investigations to come might will require all these companies to report on their pricing, taxes collected, logistics and other details to confirm or rule out information obtained during Operation Persona.

The Gazeta Mercantil (Brazil) corrects earlier reporting by InvestNews on the Cisco affair down here in Brazil.

The first part of the story is based on two anonymous sources, one of them promoting the (gabbling, I tend to think) Enron analogy — see also Cisco in Deep Crisco: “Could Be Another Enron!”

But it does finally get to what I think is probably the really burning question here: Who might be next to suffer a thorough borking from the tax man over illegal tax and tariff evasion practices?

How bad might it get? And for whom?

The really intriguing issue that remains for me, I think, rereading the press release from the feds on the case, is the case of the Panamanian law firm that, the feds made a point of charging, engages in a lot of irregular practices, not just in Brazil, but in the region.

And what Panama-based international lawfirm would that be anyway? You think maybe the fledgling Mercosul is already comparing notes?

I do think you see signs of some coordinated action already. Telefónica being challenged by regulators in other South American countries over its philosophy of customer service — “We’re the phone company. We don’t care. We don’t have to.” — for example …
Some excerpts:

SÃO PAULO, 18 de outubro de 2007 – Diferentemente do que foi publicado hoje na matéria “Caso Cisco deixa mercado de tecnologia apreensivo”, a Network1 não distribui os produtos da Cisco no Brasil, mas de concorrentes da multinacional americana. Segue abaixo texto corrigido:

Unlike what was published today in the article “Cisco case leaves tech market uneasy,” Network1 does not distribute Cisco products in Brazil, but rather the products of Cisco’s competitors. The corrected text follows:

Além de macular a imagem, quem fez compras da empresa teme não receber os produtos. O momento é de tensão para o mercado de telecomunicações. Todas as operadoras telefônicas fixas e celulares, call centers e empresas de internet em geral compram roteadores e sistemas de rede internet da Cisco Systems, envolvida na Operação Persona da Polícia Federal, que ontem prendeu 40 pessoas suspeitas de envolvimento em fraude fiscal, incluindo o presidente Pedro Ripper e o ex-presidente Carlos Roberto Carnevali. O volume da sonegação pode atingir R$ 1,5 bilhão, segundo a Polícia Federal.

Besides staining its public image, those who ordered from Cisco are afraid they will not get the products they ordered. It is a tense moment in the telecommunications market. All the fixed-line and cellular telephone operators, call centers and Internet providers in general buy routers and Internet systems from Cisco, which is involved in Operation Persona, in which 40 persons were arrested on suspicion of fraud, including Cisco Brasil president Ripper and former president Carnevali. …

Les Echos: “Non aux cohortes étrangères!”

First, we show that periods of high stock market valuations are systematically followed by large increases in reported frauds. We then show that during periods of suspicious accounting, firms hire and invest excessively, while insiders exercise options and sell stocks. When the misreporting is detected, firms shed labor and capital and productivity improves. In the aggregate, our model seems able to account for periods of jobless and investment-less growth. –“The Economics of Fraudulent Accounting,” Simi Kedia and Thomas Philippon, NBER Working Paper No. 11573, August 2005, Revised February 2006, JEL No. E0, G3. Copyright reserved by the authors.

Quoi ces cohortes étrangères!
Feraient la loi dans nos foyers!
Quoi! ces phalanges mercenaires
Terrasseraient nos fils guerriers!

Thomas Philippon : Des médias indépendants, condition d’une bonne gouvernance des entreprises (Les Echos, France): The staff of French business daily, currently owned by the FT-owning Pearson Group, would rather not be Gazprommed, as I have note before. See also

• “Les Echos” Chamber on Editorial Independence
• Enron Buys the Wall Street Journal!

The newsroom staff has organized an entire section on the debate over the proposed sale to the LVMH luxury goods group, with testimonials from a number of prominent biz brains. Here, Thomas Phillipon of NYU’s Stern School of Business offers an answer to the burning question of the hour:

• “Institutional Conflicts”: Why Do They Suck?

The debate is heating up here in Brazil as well, with a proposed rule from the CVM — the Tupi SEC — to curb “pump and dump” and “gabbling ratfink” tactics in the business press — including what I like to call “nam myoho renge kyo journalism,” I would imagine. See

• Brazil: “Tupi SEC Targets Journalistic Pump and Dump”

And see also

• Crooked Journos: Continental Precursors

There is fierce resistance here, under the by now all too familiar banner of that peculiarly libertine notion of “freedom of expression.” I have a recent article in my clippings file from Consultor Jurídico in that general vein that I will excerpt pra inglês ver when I get a chance.

Disclosure: I used to hang around a lot of those Stern seminars on market structure and the like when I was trying to figure out how on earth to earn a living covering rocket science when my degree was in poetry, and took a few courses at the NYU continuing ed program in publishing once upon a time. The NYU Weltaunschauung has therefore probably infilitrated my brain, insidiously.

Next thing you know I will discover that it has been infiltrated by the same infinitely guileless  communist supermen as the Council on Foreign Relations. See

• “Rawls’ Theory of Justice is a Cryptomarxist Manchurian Brainwashing Campaign!”
• Olavo de Carvalho: The Council on Foreign Relations is a Tool of the Communist Devils

Un grand nombre de journaux, de radios et de chaînes de télévision français sont détenus par des groupes industriels, et le rachat des ” Echos ” par LVMH ne ferait que renforcer cette singularité nationale. L’enjeu recouvre deux questions distinctes. Premièrement, quel est le rôle des médias dans la gouvernance économique ? Deuxièmement, quelle est l’influence réelle de la nature du propriétaire sur le contenu d’un journal ? Une étude américaine récente montre l’importance des médias pour la détection des fraudes financières.

A large number of newspapers, radio stations and TV networks in France are owned by industrial groups, and the sale of “Les Echos” to LVMH only reinforces that singular fact about the French news media. The deal raises two different questions. First, what is the role of the news media in economic governance? And second, What is the real nature of the influence the owner has over the content of a newspaper? A recent U.S. study shows the imporrtance of the news media to the detection of financial frauds.

“Four Flavors of Fear”: Excerpts from the Casas Memo

The Casas-Sánchez memo to Arias: “Some urgent actions to reanimate the Yes on CAFTA campaign.” First and foremost: A media blitz based on “fear, uncertainty and doubt.” Kevin Casas, who resigned from the government, is under investigation for illegal use of public funds to benefit the “Yes” campaign. His permanent replacement as Minister of Planning was announced yesterday.

“For our friends, anything; for our enemies, the law.”

“Some 23% percent of working-class respondents indicated they could run into problems if they talked about the FTA, or otherwise expressed hesitation about discussing the issue.” –University of Costa Rica School of Statistics, Institution of Social Research. “Referendum and Free Trade Agreement, Telephone Surveys Between July and September, 2007.”

The major newspaper in Costa Rica published on its front page a letter by U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab warning that the U.S. would refuse to renegotiate the terms of the free trade agreement with Costa Rica if CAFTA was voted down.

A follow-up to

• Costa Rica: “FUD Mud Slung at Schwab Job”

The memo is dated July 29, 2007, and is addressed to the president and prime minister of Costa Rica by Kevin Casas (former Minister of Planning, a professor of The Theory of the State at the University of Costa Rica and a lawyer representing the Arias Foundation) and Fernando Sánchez, a lawmaker in the government coalition (and, like Casas, an Oxford-trained political scientist).

(I am assuming from the fact that Casas resigned over the flap — his replacement was named today — that he actually wrote this. I have not seen any claims yet that the document published by Costa Rican newspaper was doctored or dummied up out of thin air.)

They propose that a YES committee be formed immediately to defend that position in the CAFTA referendum, and that the President be a member of that committee.

At another juncture, they propose organizing visits by senior government officials to the country’s largest private employers. Such as Chiquita — “Well, okay, yes, we ran guns for the AUC, but it was to protect our workers” — and Dole.

They suggest covering the visits as “information sessions on the government’s economic development plan, … or some such thing.”

“So as to cover our [backsides] with the TSE [elections tribunal],” they continued.

But allegedly the government is not allowed to use its command of the gazillion-jigawatt megaphone to through its weight behind one proposition or the other. Vincente Fox is in some trouble down in Mexico right now for the some sort of thing (Dick Morris told him to do it).

Casas was honored by the World Economic Forum in as one of 250 young leaders. Along with executives from Intel, Google, Apple and a Harvard Business School professor. And Jimmy Wales, the Confucian sage of Wikipedia.

I have been translating some sections off the PDF posted by the principal opposition party. Casas’ “innovation journalism” campaign, as outlined in the memo:

6. Plan and launch a massive campaign in the media: Beyond what can be done in communities and the business community, in the little time remaining, we must have absolutely no shame about saturating the media with publicity. Precisely because time is short, it is absolutely vital that we direct this campaign in two directions:

Debunk the idea that this is a struggle of rich against poor: This will require carefully choosing the faces that will represent “Yes” in the campaign, the use of workers and small business owners exclusively.

Likewise, we must ratchet up the decibels to a massive degree, along with the presence of the government’s social agenda in the media and official speeches.

We must stimulate fear. This fear has four types (modes):

“The Worst Airline in the World”: A Reply to Elizabeth Spiers

Simulated journalism: TV Globo puts a pilot in front of a (Sino-Paraguayan, no doubt) copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator and reports the results. Ecce TV Globo.

Apparently, much as TAM has cut back on service-desk personnel, leaving passengers out of the information loop and desperate, the Washington Post is now cutting costs by using bloggers instead of real journalists. Real journalists source their information, for example. I am having a hard time finding a single sourcing statement for any of the factoids you trot out.

We need a communications policy and an ongoing dialogue with the mass media that will guarantee that the sense of risk is proportionate to the actual risk. –Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar Maia.

[U.S.] air travel deteriorated this summer from a combination of severe weather, especially in June, an aging, [an] overtaxed air-traffic-control system and record-high load factors on flights. When storms broke out, the air-traffic-control system couldn’t keep up, and passengers of canceled flights had trouble finding seats since so many tickets had been sold. … changes [designed to cope with these facts] will drive costs higher for airlines. But they reflect a new reality: Late flights, stranded travelers, misconnected luggage and angry customers all have a price, too. And congestion in the skies is likely only to get worse. —“Airlines Apply Lessons of Bummer Summer,” W$J, Sept. 4, 2007

Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas
And I have learned how these things work together
I see the parkway that passes through them all
And I have learned how to look at these things and say
I wouldn’t live there if you paid me I couldn’t live like that, no siree!
–Talking Heads, “The Big Country”

Dear Elizabeth Spiers,

Brazilian journo Paulo Henrique Amorim reproduced your article on why TAM is the worst airline in the world on his Conversa Afiada Web log on Brazil’s iG news portal.

I just read it.

I think you are exaggerating, cooking up phony comparisons not even based on soft numbers, and in general engaging in gabbling glittering generalities.

Have a look at the air disaster rates at http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/, just to start with. First source of actual information that I googled up.

In 2004, the airlines with the highest accident rates in Latin America are Cubana and Aeromexico. TAM and Gol were not even in the top 10, but have each had one fatal mishap since then.

Brazil: “Tupi SEC Targets Journalistic Pump and Dump”

“The CVM caused a controversy with its view that when journalists recommend an investment in a specific stock or firm, they are acting as investment analysts, an activity that is regulated.“

The Observatório da Imprensa notes this from Brazil’s national federation of journalists, FENAJ: A proposed rule by the Brazilian federal securities regulator targets conflicts of interest in business journalism.

I hardly ever write about the financial and investment sectors in this blog anymore, although I do keep clipping to the NMM newswire there. That’s partly because those topics represent actual work, where I don’t have the luxury of just shooting my mouth off, while my blogging represents puttering in the garage — where I can blow my eyebrows off trying to invent flubber if I want to. It’s my garage, after all.

Entidades da área de comunicação reagiram negativamente à postura da Comissão de Valores Mobiliários que, no dia 16 de agosto, colocou em audiência pública, proposta de normatização da atuação dos analistas de investimentos e dos jornalistas especializados na área. A medida vem sendo caracterizada como uma tentativa de censura.

Professional associations in the communications field reacted negatively to the position of the Securities Commission, which, on August 16, held a public hearing on a proposed regulation of investment analysts and journalists specialized in the area. The measure is being characterized as an attempt at censorship.

In Brazilian labor legislation, the job category of “journalism” encompasses both hacks and flacks, remember. In Brazil, Richard “Rashomon” Edelman would be referred to as “the journalist Richard Edelman.” See Hacks are Flacks! Banana-Republican Business Journalism Illustrated.

A certain element in FENAJ — principally those who defend Abril and Globo’s journalistic practices — tends to scream “Stalinism” at every turn. “It is our God-given right to vouch for gabbling nonsense because we do not bother to check our facts before running it! Or worse.” On which see also

• Veja Só: Editorial Integrity at Brazil’s Grupo Abril

In the U.K. a year or so ago, wasn’t there a case of a financial columnist who turned out to be getting paid off to use the gazillion-jigawatt megaphone of the press to promote a “pump and dump” pyramid scheme? I believe the guy was arrested. This is the kind of thing we are talking about. Some of the same general issues that arose in the SEC’s Great Global Research Settlement, really.

When the Dantas group was fighting to maintain control of Brasil Telecom, for example, the investigations turned up e-mails suggesting that the group coopted journalists into ratfinking its enemies and beatifying the paymaster. We are still waiting for the other shoe to drop on that case. See also

• Crooked Journos: Continental Precursors
• Dantas’ Inferno and the Tupi SEC: Journos Cry “SLAPP Suit” in Pension, Privatization Pilantragens
• The Crucifixion of Leonardo Attuch
• Dantas and Kroll: Early Daze
• China: “Journo Gets Jail for YouTube Phony Pork Bork!”

A CVM é uma autarquia vinculada ao Ministério da Fazenda que fiscalizar e disciplinar o mercado de valores mobiliários brasileiros. Com o lançamento do Edital de Audiência Pública nº 09/2007, a CVM abriu uma polêmica ao considerar que, quando recomenda um investimento em determinada ação ou empresa, o jornalista atua como analista de investimento, atividade que é regulamentada.

… With the launch of Request for Public Comments No. 09/2007, the CVM provoked its controversy with its view that when journalists recommend an investment in a specific stock or firm, they are acting as investment analysts, an activity that is regulated.

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.

Hard Multicore: “The Revolution Will Not Be Virtualized”?

“Without it, life would be hell on earth.” Microtec advertisement, Veja magazine, issue 87. File under “the rhetoric of the technological sublime (RTS) in postmodern technology PR, Velvet Elvis tendency.”

“So far the software revolution has not happened.” — Marc Tremblay, SUNW.

Computer-Chip Makers Pick Up Pace in Multicore Race (W$&): Intel, AMD and Sun tout new multiprocessor chips. A W$J tech reporter explains multicore processing for dummies and poetry majors.

I note it mainly because I am supposed to try to understand such things, for work.

Also, it is kind of interesting to see a computer industry flack talking counter to the rhetoric of the technological sublime here — to “revolution,” “magic,” “ushering in a New Age,” “paradigm shift,” and all of that nonsense.

For example, contrast “Fake News in the W$J: “Is iPhone AT&T’s Magic Bullet?”

… Others have pushed the multicore concept even further. Sun Microsystems Inc., which last week discussed a new version of a chip with eight processor cores, today will provide new details about a 16-core chip arriving next year.

Sun gets the lion’s share of the ink in this quick overview story because its launch is the news hook. Fair enough.

That chip, code-named Rock, may attract more attention for another feature — built-in circuitry for minimizing a bottleneck that has prevented software from fully exploiting multicore chips.

The revolution has not panned out!

“So far the software revolution has not happened,” said Marc Tremblay, a Sun senior vice president. If Rock can ease the programming problem, “we think it’s a pretty big deal.”

Mexico: The Heirs of El Tigre Fight for Televisa

Televisa shows Ye Gon getting his green card from Fox. Over and over and over and over again. From various angles. News camera footage and surveillance footage. In heavy rotation, like a Madonna video.

Azcárraga Jean on trial (Proceso, Mexico): How Emilio “El Tigrillo” Azcárraga Jean got control of Mexico’s Televisa. A Mexican Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in the making?

Possibly another illustration of why, as modern capital markets advanced, hereditary autocracies tended to give way to meritocracies. (Void in Texas and the compounds of coastal Maine). As if the the decline of the Medici clan did not already exemplify the apple falling farther and farther from the tree.

Desde el principio despertaron sospechas las maniobras de Emilio Azcárraga Jean para hacerse del control absoluto de las acciones de Televisa tras la muerte de su padre, en 1997. Ahora, por la soberbia de no negociar con los otros legatarios, tiene que enfrentar una demanda de Paula Cusi, viuda legal de El Tigre, por 800 millones de dólares, en un litigio que puede sacar a flote información que el consorcio ha mantenido oculta.

From the very beginning there were suspicions about the maneuvers Emilio Azcárraga Jean used to get absolute control over the shares of Televisa after the death of his father in 1997. Now, thanks to his arrogant refusal to negotiate with other heirs, he must face a lawsuit by Paula Cusi, El Tigre’s legal widow, for $800 million, in a case that could bring to the surface information that the consortium has kept hidden until now.

“Rawls’ Theory of Justice is a Cryptomarxist Manchurian Brainwashing Campaign!”

The business of America is … comic-book political philosophy for dummies?

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. — Dwight Eisenhower to Edgar Newton Eisenhower, November 8, 1954.

Yes, but then they realized they could overcome the former disadvantage by owning the million-jigawatt megaphone. So they “invented” Journalism 2.0 and noise machines.

See also The Council on Foreign Relations is a Tool of the Communist Devils! and The Folha de S. Paulo Explains The Theory of the Master Race.

We have a Central American dairy farmer painting our apartment at the moment — prospective lessors are popping in and out on guided tours conducted by our local broker, the competent and charming  emotionally unstable and conniving Marjorie of Rastaman Vibration Realty — so we have been remote officing out of the Tea Lounge — the one in Brooklyn, not the one in Norway.

Nice guy, up visiting his daughter, a condominium colleague of ours.

On Hugo Chávez: “No good, too buddy-buddy with Fidel.” On Bush: “Spent a trillion dollars on Iraq. Killed a lotta people. For what? Should have bought more land and cows, metaphorically speaking.”

We chat about dollar-real and dollar-peso arbitrage and adventures in rural electrification for a while. (Someone within our six-degrees network recently to fork out a “grease payment” to someone promising to finally deliver the long-overdue juice to their rural sitio — the dacha of the Paulista — but the promise was never kept. Greasy indeed.)

He requests a CD burn of our Greatest Hits of Celia Cruz, offering a hot little Salvadoran cumbia sampler in return. A fair deal, we find. Free culture and all that.

The Tea Lounge has now outsourced its free WiFi service. Administering its own server was a hassle, apparently, and it is certainly true that the scruffy, surly tattooed minimum-wage youth that man the counters had no clue on how to keep the thing running. But the ad-supported free service it opted for is gabblingly bad.

The result being that I pick up a paper copy of the Wall Street Journal for a change and read a section that I normally do not click through to on the Web site: Letters.

For one of the premiere business publications in the world, the minds of readers selected to represent what’s on the minds of W$J readers sure don’t seem to have their minds much on business per se.

Top debate in the Weekend Journal’s letters section at the moment, for example: “Resolved: Political philosopher John Rawls was a crypto-Marxist pseudophilosopher!” W$J readers are apparently unanimous in support of that proposition. The leading light of the Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute of Chicago recommends reading Ayn Rand instead:

Prof. Schaefer is mistaken when he says Rawls “left his principles of justice at such an extreme level of generality that they pointed to no specific political conclusions, certainly not the ones attributed to them by his followers.”

TAM Disaster: “There Was Nothing Wrong With the Airbus!”

Simulated journalism: TV Globo puts a pilot in front of a (Sino-Paraguayan, no doubt) copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator and reports the results. Ecce TV Globo.

Attribution to another publication … cannot serve as license to print rumors that would not meet the test of The Times’s own reporting standards. Rumors must satisfy The Times’s standard of newsworthiness, taste and plausibility before publication, even when attributed. And when the need arises to attribute, that is a good cue to consult with the department head about whether publication is warranted at all. –The New York Times, Guidelines on Integrity.

Airbus conclui que avião da TAM não tinha defeito: The Folha de S. Paulo breathlessly reports that the Jornal Nacional (Globo) reports that an internal Airbus memorandum — leaked exclusively to the intrepid journalists of TV Globo! — concludes that there was nothing wrong with the Airbus that crashed!

Or so the Folha headlines it.

It would be accurate to say that the black box data does not indicate any mechanical failure.

There is an important difference that makes a difference between the two statements: That instruments did not indicate mechanical failure and that there was no mechanical failure.

Compare the headlines in newspapers around the world — good ones, even — who picked up the phony Veja magazine exposé in syndication: “Pilot error caused the accident.”

See

• Veja Magazine: “How To Fabricate a Scoop”
• Veja Magazine: “Pilot Error Caused TAM Crash!”

Proposed NMM warning label: because it comes through a content pipeline labeled “information” does not mean it actually is.

Some of Ye Gon’s shipments — to continue the analogy — were marked “antibiotics.”

Lab tests showed they were not antibiotics, according to the DEA’s warrant applications.

So if the Mexican “mountain of money” scandal is a frame-narrative or Rashomon of dueling “Chinese tales” — a Second Life in which the laws of physics do not apply to kung fu fighting — the Brazilian air disaster is a game of “Chinese whispers.”

Chinese whispers or Telephone is a game in which each successive participant secretly whispers to the next a phrase or sentence whispered to them by the preceding participant. Cumulative errors from mishearing often result in the sentence heard by the last player differing greatly and amusingly from the one uttered by the first. It is most often played by children as a party game or in the playground. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies of rumours.

The Folha today:

Um documento “Telegrama de Informação de Acidentes da Airbus” mostra que as caixas-pretas do Airbus-A320 da TAM que caiu [sic] no último dia 17 não identificaram defeitos mecânicos na aeronave, de acordo com reportagem do “Jornal Nacional”, da TV Globo, veiculada nesta sexta-feira.

A document titled “Informational Telegram on Airbus Accidents” shows that the black boxes from the TAM Airbus A320 that fell [sic] on July 17 did not identify mechanical defects in the aircraft, according to a report aired on TV Globo’s Jornal Nacional this Friday.

In what sense does an wheels-down aircraft that runs out of runway “fall”?

More importantly, to what extent are flight data recorders capable of revealing, or ruling out, mechanical defects?

“Our Airport Was Beyond Perfect”: Infraero Press Release

Settlement with the federal attorney in February set operating conditions for the airport. Compliance is being evaluated by grim-faced “lawyers with gel in their hair.”

Brazil’s INFRAERO published this press release on July 19.

It makes an interesting case study in crisis communications.

A Infraero lamenta profundamente a interrupção de vidas preciosas no acidente com o AirbusJJ 3054 da TAM no Aeroporto de Congonhas, em São Paulo, na terça-feira, 17 de julho, passageiros, tripulantes e pessoas que estavam em terra nas imediações,no momento do choque.

Infraero deeply laments the cutting short of precious lives in the accident involving AirbusJJ 3054 [sic] of TAM at the Congonhas airport on July 13, passengers, crew members and people on the ground in the area at the moment of impact.

Neste momento, se há algum tipo de alívio ao luto e pesar de toda a sociedade brasileira,socorre-nos a consciência tranqüila de que todos os setores do Governo Federal,responsáveis pela segurança e eficiência do setor aéreo, aeronáutico e aeroportuário, estão fornecendo todas as respostas que a população exige para tão doloroso acidente.

At this moment, if there is any consolation to ease the mourning and concern of Brazilian society, let us take comfort in the tranquil knowledge that all sectors of the Federal Government responsible for the safety and efficiency of air travel, aviation and airport are providing all the answers that the people demand about this sad accident.

Como administradora da rede federal de aeroportos, a Infraero afirma com toda segurança a todos os usuários, clientes, companhias aéreas, à mídia e ao público em geral, que o Aeroporto de Congonhas está plenamente dotado de condições operacionais de excelência nas suas duas pistas, que recentemente passaram por reformas estruturais.

As the administrator of the network of federal airports, Infraero can state with total confidence to all its users, customers, airlines, the media and the general public, that the Congonhas airport is fully supplied with operational conditions of excellence on its two runways, which recently underwent structural renovations.

In the past tense? It is my understanding that the renovation project was not yet complete. They still had to do the grooves. It was supposed to be done by July 25, I read.

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

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. –Zhenli Ye Gon

• [UPDATE: “To Whom It May Concern Letters Are Phony”: Ye Gon Lawyers (July 18, 2007). Or so Milenio reports them as reporting that they will report today.]

Carta de Zhenli Ye Gon (Segunda parte de dos) | El Universal: Part II of the 17-page letter issued by the Chinese-Mexican pharma exec who accuses the PAN establishment of “a sinister political conspiracy” even as he is accused of having the fix in at Customs so he could bring in meth precursors and sell it to the Sinaloa (Milennium) Cartel.

Part I: Ye Gon: “To Whom It May Concern.”

The Los Angeles Times has a story on the strange saga today, but as far as I can tell from a quick google, no one has published the text of the letter yet. The Times has this efficient and dismissive little summary of where the mountain of money got to in the meantime that the Mexican press might be interested in.

Beginning March 29, the U.S. bills were shipped to New York to be recounted and checked for counterfeits. It took three trips to haul the cash, officials said. Mexico’s attorney general said authorities paid Bank of America $1.4 million to count and authenticate the money.

I kind of figured as much. They should have put that in their fourth incomplete-disclosure press release on the subject and put an end to speculation. The Mexican government is sorely in need of some competent message-control flacks, it seems to me. I mean hey, I read money and numbers press-release for a modest living and the thing just did not add up. It was missing key information. The LA Times seems eager to help them get the story straight, though.

After counting the cash five times, bank officials discovered an additional $960,000, bringing the new total to $207 million. Representatives of the Bank of America declined to comment.

Good beancounting from Lalaland. If true. It does cite only official sources.

The money was then electronically transferred back to the Bank of Mexico and the Mexican Treasury. According to Mexico’s Service for the Administration and Appropriation of Goods, the agency that monitors property seized in criminal cases, the money had earned $1.6 million in interest as of June 30. A report in the Mexico City newspaper El Financiero said the money had been invested in Mexican Treasury bonds.

I appreciate the Times identifying the local press source it got the information from — unlike Larry Rohter of its right-coast namesake. I read El Financiero — which has a Chinese-language edition now — and find it a source of info with many signs that it is managed and operated by responsible, non-Moonie adults.

The “Chinese fairy tale,” as Calderón repeats today with a sneer in the top headline in El U, continues.

Does any of it add up?

I have no idea: I, like you, await the verdict of implacable beancounters on that issue. But the Times has no qualms about editorializing in the news hole on this point:

The letter spun a fantastic story that involved suitcases filled with money delivered by cars with diplomatic license plates. Officials from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, made him an “honorary senator,” Ye Gon wrote.

What is so fantastic about that? If they did not bring it in cars of some kind, what did they bring it in? Burro-trains? Wheelbarrows? The cash got there somehow. Why not in cars?

And what, is it all that improbable that Mexican politicians might tell you that you are going to need political patronage for your business, so maybe you should do them a favor? Read a book or two, people. These things do happen. We are not talking about three-headed monkeys from Planet Xenon here, at least.

The LA Times is occasionally viciously slanted these days, especially on its Latin American desk. See also Brazil: “The Folklore of Corruption.”

Compare Rohter on Maluf: The Blind Eye Misreading the Blind Eye, in which the Right Coast Times man editorializes that an international money-laundering bust of a crooked Brazilian pol was “bizarre.”

The same principle applies, the LA Times ought to publish the text of the letter and ferret out the elements it considers “fantastic” before making such a blanket assertion about the credibility of the narrative.

I mean, if the LA Times knows for a fact that this is a fantastic tale, but withholds information as to why that judgment is correct, why should we buy the LA Times? I don’t know know about you, but I buy the newspaper for the nouns and numbers, not for the adjectives.

If it all turns out to be an elaborate fiction, the reader is entitled to the details of its debunking. That, after all, is the fun part.

Otherwise, fear, uncertainty and doubt may continue to circulate forever, like the notion that ETA pulled off 11-M in Spain.

Daniel Dantas: “Conversations in the Clouds”

The São Paulo New Yorker clone even features Art Spiegelman up the wazoo. Not that I have anything against the creator of RAW comix and author of In the Shadow of No Towers, mind you. And my wife loves it. I find it mildly diverting but nonsensical on the whole. Like the sheep it was cloned from.

Teatro,
lo tuyo es puro teatro
falsedad bien ensayada
estudiado simulacro.

A Brazilian blog called Portal Denúncia finally brings me a clipping from the recent Piauí magazine profile on the MIT-trained banker Daniel Dantas — which I find to be less of a crude “autohagiography by proxy” than secondhand reports indicated when it first came out.

See “Piauí Lies”: New Yorker Clone Runs Autohagiography by Proxy. It is a variant on the “autohagiography by proxy” nevertheless.

Veteran journo Mino Carta had complained that Piauí let libelous statements about him by the “jug-eared” banker pass without a reality check:

This is not journalism, just as running a profile of a public figure without noting the pros and cons and hearing both friends and detractors is not journalism.

Mino has a point.

The deadpan “I am a camera” treatment that Piauí gives the jug-eared banker certainly makes for some interesting storytelling. But that’s the problem with the “I am a camera” form of narrative journalism. It’s all style and no substance, and prone to abuse as the reporter abdicates the responsibility to provide a critical perspective.

It’s the “words into type” version of the case we examined in NMM(-TV)SNBCNNBS: The Cops of Fox x Globo’s BOPE.

Globo’s Fantástico equipped Rio’s BOPE “trooper elite” with cameras and let them film their own operations.

It sent no reporter along to provide an independent perspective, and it edited the resulting footage into what is best described as a series of screenshots from a first-person shooter video game.

Nothing was revealed.

Nevertheless, I proceed to clip an excerpt pra inglês ver. The Dantas saga is a rich and instructive business case and morality play, a classic case study in the dramaturgy of hysterical virginity and the stagecraft of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Numa tarde ensolarada do começo do outono, a “Serenata no 13 em sol maior”, de Mozart, ecoava pela sala envidraçada que abriga a presidência do banco Opportunity. A ela, seguiram-se sonatas, sinfonias, concertos. O ocupante da sala, o economista Daniel Dantas, surpreendeu-se com a pergunta sobre o seu apreço por música clássica. “Como?”, reagiu, sem entender. “Ah, a música!”, disse, afinal. Com um sorriso maroto, caminhou em direção à janela, apontou um pequeno vão no teto, entre a janela e a persiana, e informou: “Descobrimos microfones aqui, estavam ouvindo as conversas e antecipando nossos movimentos”. Dantas mandou instalar um sistema de som no forro do teto do banco — o Opportunity ocupa o 28o andar de um dos maiores prédios do centro do Rio — para dificultar a gravação do que se diz ali.

On a sunny afternoon in early October, Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 in G major was echoing through the glass-walled offfice of the president of the Opportunity Bank. It was followed by sonatas, symphonies, concertos. The occupant, economist Daniel Dantas, was surprised by the question about his affinity for classical music. “What?” he asked, uncomprehending. “Oh, the music!” he said finally. With a sickly smile, he walked over to the window, point to the slight gap in the ceiling between the window and the blinds, and said: “We found microphones here, they were listening to our converations and anticipating our movements.” Dantas had a sound system installed in the lining of the bank’s ceiling — Opportunity occupies the 28th floor of one of the largest buildings in downtown Rio — to make it difficult to record what gets said there.

Para evitar que adversários registrassem suas palavras, chegou a fazer reuniões nas nuvens. O jato particular decolava do aeroporto Santos Dumont e não ia a lugar nenhum. Dava voltas sobre o Rio, às vezes por mais de uma hora, para que executivos do Opportunity pudessem conversar livres de grampo. Alguns códigos não-verbais foram criados para a comunicação entre Dantas e seus diretores, reduzindo a necessidade de conversas. Ele recorre a videoconferências apenas para se comunicar com seus advogados em São Paulo, Paris, Nova York e Londres. E só em último caso, diz, usa o telefone para tratar de “assunto sério”.

To avoid having adversaries record his words, he went so far as to hold meetings in the clouds. The private jet would take off from Santos Dumont on a trip to nowhere. It flew circles around Rio, sometimes for over an hour, so that Opportunity executives could converse free of wiretaps. Non-verbal codes were created for communications between Dantas and his board members, reducing the need for conversations. He uses videoconferences only to communicate with his lawyers in São Paulo, New York and London.

And Cambridge, Mass., apparently.

Only as a last resort, he says, will he use the telephone to talk about a “serious subject.”

Sounds like the communications security strategy of John “The Teflon Don” Gotti, doesn’t it? Walking up and down the sidewalk in front of Satriale’s pork store, holding your hand over your mouth to defeat the FBI lip readers?
When the Brasil Telecom boardroom was discovered to have been riddled with surveillance equipment, in the midst of the board’s dispute with Dantas — photos were published — the company that installed it claimed it was actually countersurveillance equipment.

Fake News in the W$J: “Is iPhone AT&T’s Magic Bullet?”

W$J puff piece is based on push-polling. Many signs to indicate that this is fake news. And by the way: If a little over half of users are aware of the iPhone and 12 percent of those are planning to get one– presumably people who have not heard of it are not that fired up about it — then fewer than 6% of users surveyed are waiting to get one, and more than 94% are not. You call that “massive demand”?

Apple hasn’t had to do much to generate awareness of the device. More than half of phone subscribers in the U.S. and Britain know about it, according to M:Metrics.

How can you honestly gauge interest in something you have already concluded is “highly anticipated”?

The notion that the iPhone is a “word of mouth” phenomenon is utterly, utterly phony — as phony as the second leg of Tony Soprano’s Russian hooker friend, remember her? — as we all know full freaking well.

TIME magazine gave unprecedented space on its cover to the product launch. In Brazil, you had the massive advertorial for the Apple iPhone published on the covers of Brazil’s Veja — “It’s Like Magic” — and Época (Globo) magazines — “Cellular Revolution.”

Globo and Grupo Abril publications continue to run cover stories with “innovation” themes, such as the autohagiographical by proxy “Why Steve Jobs is a genius!”

On the cover of The Economist this week: “Apple and the art of innovation.” And so on, ad nauseam.

And now this: Is iPhone AT&T’s Magic Bullet? The same week, Steve Jobs is quoted as calling the gizmo”this magical device.”

The Wall $t Journal‘s Amos Sharma and Nick Wingfield commit an act of innovation journalism:

… essentially, a form of fake news similar to that used by Colombian narcoparamilitaries.

Compare

• “Internet Killed the Video Star”: The Banality of the Vendor-Sponsored Research Write-Up
• Innovation Journalism Watch: “Economist Challenges Ideas About Inequality”
• I Am Qurious (Yellow Journalism): A Trivial Exercise in Documenting the Rhetoric of the Technological Sublime
• “The Sweet Teat of Junket Whoredom”: The Public Editor on “Fighting Toadies”(tech puff piece writer was treated to massive blogola; Byron Calame wrings his hands and huffs and puffs.)
• Redmond & Televisa: A Match Made in Tijuana? (BBC puff piece on Mexico’s Enciclomedia project after federal auditor discovers massive waste, fraud and abuse in the program)
• From The Sharper Ombudsman Catalogue (innovation journalists work the press ombudsman confab at Harvard recently; keep an eye peeled for the product placement.)
• Victors, Spoils, Wikis, Hagiographies, Shills

The classy W$J infographic that accompanies the story seems to be based on push-polling not dissimilar from the push-polling used in this case: Globo Push Poll: “Vote Early, Vote Often.”

The message: Demand is massive! Don’t buck the trend!

Overall demand for the device is massive. About 19 million people in the U.S., or roughly 9% of cellphone users, are highly interested in purchasing the iPhone, even when armed with the knowledge they’ll need to pay $499 or $599 to snatch up one of the two versions, and will need to be an AT&T subscriber, according to M:Metrics.

The infographic says 12%.

The Minister of the Future Has a Future! Or Does He?

Unger: revisionist autohagiographer?

Last week, dos Mares said that if Mangabeira did not drop a lawsuit filed against BrT in a U.S. court — the pension funds are principal shareholders in BrT — he would have to renounce the post. Valor has discovered that the law suit had not been withdrawn as of Monday night.

Governo contraria fundos e confirma Mangabeira: Was Harvard Law professor Mangabeira Unger able to convince the President of Brazil that he should not be disqualified for having sued Brasil Telecom for outstanding attorney’s fees in a matter that might later have to be litigated by a Brazilian court or regulator?

The answer is no, not yet.

So why is the story headlined “government confirms Mangabeira”? Welcome to the Brazilian newspaper, where truth is falsehood and vice versa. Compare the headline in A Tarde: “Still unknown whether Mangabeira Unger will take office.”

Mangabeira said he had dropped the motion for attorney’s fees — or was in the process of dropping it, or something, mumble mumble.

See Brazil: “Is The Minister of the Future History?”

But Valor says that that just ain’t so — though it does not say how it knows. The suit is still in force, and a countersuit has been filed, Valor reports.

The thing is that Lula is still in India, leaving Mangabeira colleague José Alencar as acting president. And like Dubya, President Squid tends to insist that he is “the decider.”

O governo confirmou nesta segunda-feira a posse do professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger como ministro-chefe da Secretaria de Ações de Longo Prazo (Sealopra). A posse, segundo assessores do Palácio do Planalto, deve acontecer no próximo dia 15. O anúncio, feito pelo ministro das Relações Institucionais, Walfrido dos Mares Guia, surpreendeu dirigentes dos três maiores fundos de pensão ligados a empresas estatais – Previ (Banco do Brasil), Petros (Petrobras) e Funcef (Caixa Econômica Federal) -, contrários à nomeação do professor da Universidade de Harvard.

The government confirmed this Monday that Roberto Mangabeira Unger will be sworn in as Secretary of Long-Term Activities (Sealopra). The ceremony is scheduled for June 15, according to presidential aides. The announcement, made by Institutional Relations minister dos Mares, surprised the heads of the three major pension funds for state enterprises — PREVI (Bank of Brazil), PETROS (Petrobras, the state oil company) and FUNCEF (federal credit union, sort of) — who oppose the Harvard Law professor’s nomination.

Brazil: Digital Inclusion Competition Announced

Surf City Cidade de Deus: Sarcastic Brazilian tadinhos have been impatient with the stalled progress of digital inclusion (above), but now that São Jorge de Luladocio has slain the Wintel-AMD duopoly, will it prove to have been worth the wait?

Renato Cruz | Laptops para o governo: The Estado de S. Paulo blogger reports that the Brazilian government is opening a competitive bidding process to supply it with 150,000 “one laptop per child” machines for a pilot project for Brazilian schools.

The MIT “$100 laptop” will compete with an Indian project and the Classmate — which both Intel and AMD will produce a model of, as I understand, unlike what Mr. Cruz reports. Let me check. And see also The Positivo Choice: Wintel or Lintel — there are homegrown alternatives in the other bracket of this single-elimination tournament, I think.

My bet: Given recent statements by the Brazilian government — “Brazil ought to do more business with India, says Lula” — I would say the Indian machine has an inside edge, but whichever machine makes the most intensive use ofthe domestic supply chain is going to win. Just a guess. Economic nationalism and Mercosul regional integration rears its ugly head, and David Sasaki is there to sneer at it.

In fact, if you read the Brazil coverage in Global Voices Online, the blogging project of the Berkman Center for the Intel-Inside society, on this topic, you will see why I refer to it as the Berkman Center for the Intel-Inside Society.

According to Mr. Murilo, the Brazilian government faced a stark choice between (1) ordering several million MIT “$100 laptop” machines and (2) dooming itself to the dark ages forever.

Which was utter nonsense, of course. Just ask the Indians, who politely declined the Kermit-green gizmo for tiny fingers and built a competing gizmo. And there was plenty of news in the Brazilian tech press at the time on competing initiatives banked by the Brazilian government.

See The Brazilian Digital Inclusion Wars: Monopoly is Not a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

On editing the very existence of one’s competition out of the business news as a banana-republican marketing tactic — at Harvard, they call it “innovation journalism” — see also my Initiating Coverage: Infomedia TV.

InfomediaTV of Porto Alegre wangled a contract as the official “media sponsor” and official “news service” of the Free Software Forum (FISL) in Rio de Janeiro last year.

At the same time, it had an (undisclosed) public relations contract with Microsoft. See Terminology Watch: ‘Rasteira’ for an account of how that worked out and Brazilian Indies Protest Exclusion, CC-M$FT Partnership for another little Redmond-funded media-hacking project along those same lines.

So which is it? A “news service” or a PR agency? It’s both! It’s neither! It is, like Global Voices Online, an “innovation in journalism!” Disclosing conflicts of interest is for Luddites who don’t “get the Internet”!

O governo federal planeja abrir uma licitação internacional, no segundo semestre, para a compra de 150 mil computadores portáteis de baixo custo, que serão distribuídos para alunos de escolas públicas. “A idéia é que as crianças já estejam com os laptops em março do ano que vem”, disse ontem (1/6) Cezar Alvarez, assessor especial do presidente da República e coordenador-geral dos Programas de Inclusão Digital do governo, durante o 51.º Painel Telebrasil, na Costa do Sauípe (BA).

The federal government plans to open an international competion, in the second half of 2007, for the purchase of 150,000 low-cost portable computers to be distributed to students at public schools. “The idea is that children should have laptops by March of 2008,” said Cezar Alvarez, special advisor to the president and coordinator of Digital Inclusion Programs, during the 51st Telebrasil Conference in Costa do Sauípe, Bahia.

The Sycophantic BBC: Budd on FUD

REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT PANEL FOR THE BBC TRUST ON IMPARTIALITY OF BBC BUSINESS COVERAGE: The Budd Commission on BBC Business Journalism (PDF). Budd on FUD, for short. Click to zoom.

I am continuing to read the report of the independent commission charged with critiquing the BBC’s business coverage, which has recommended, among other things, as follows:

Measures should be taken to strengthen the monitoring of impartiality issues in business and to ensure there is compliance with the BBC’s high standards. In particular, measures should be introduced to address lapses which occur when covering commercial issues. Presenters should be regularly reminded of their obligation to be impartial.

Compare

• A “Business-Friendly” W$J?
• “Business-Friendly”: Civita and Murdoch

What are the BBC’s high impartiality standards, by the way?

A recent study on the BBC’s “post-impartiality” or “radical impartiality” suggests that BBC management has very explicitly rejected compliance with those standards in recent years.

Editorial standards and practices are for those who just don’t “get the Internet.”

See Impartiality 2.0, for example — a speech by a senior BBC editor at Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

The commission cites the Neil report, “written after the Hutton Inquiry,” and alludes to the BBC Editorial Guidelines, Charter, and Agreement.

For the BBC impartiality is a legal requirement. BBC journalists will report the facts first, understand and explain their context, provide professional judgements where appropriate, but never promote their own personal opinions. Openness and independence of mind is at the heart of practising impartiality. We will strive to be fair and open minded by reflecting all significant strands of opinion, and by exploring the range and conflict of views. Testing a wide range of views with the evidence is essential if we are to give our audiences the greatest possible opportunity to decide for themselves on the issues of the day.

See also

• BBC 2.0: False Dilemma as a Way of Second Life
• BBC: Radical Impartiality and its Discontents
• NMM(-TV)SNBCNNBS: Themes and Variations on the MediaWatch Meme

The word “sycophantic” — a very strong word indeed — is used three times in connection with a topic I follow fairly closely myself.

Writes the Budd commission:

Another challenge concerns the launch of new products. In its evidence the BBC acknowledges that there is a risk of appearing to endorse a company or product particularly when covering product launches. Our view is that these can be newsworthy events but presenters should avoid being promoters. For example, on Breakfast (BBC One, 8 December 2006) the two presenters played enthusiastically and uncritically with the Wii console.

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.”

Trust 2.0: Triumph of the Shill?

Citizen journalists are the people of the year. Vigilante consumers and professional public-interest journalists are objectionable vermin to be exterminated. Go figure.

We live in a world — as Linda Stone [of Edelman client Microsoft] describes — of continuous partial attention. –Richard Edelman

Fresh from the open-source Bloomberg box:  Richard Edelman: The Changing Face of Trust (Feb. 8).

Here, the Nietzschean superman  blurbs Edelman’s Davos-linked trust barometer 2007 and seems to suggest that the flogging, blogging astroturf machine must stay the course.

… the smart company will communicate on both the vertical and horizontal axis. The top down, one way, controlled messages often from the CEO that have characterized corporate communications is still important. The traditional media, particularly business magazines and newspapers, is vital to achieving credibility. So are expert spokespeople, such as academics, financial analysts and doctors, who can help the CEO carry the message because of their credentials. But the peer-to-peer horizontal conversation, led by impassioned employees and consumers, is now a critical companion.

The study was featured prominently in Brazil on the Jornal do Globo TV newscast, as well as on the BBC, CNN and in the Financial Times, according to the coverage section of the 2007 trust survey’s Web site.

The problem with the “peer to peer” model, of course, is that “impassioned employees” who do not disclose themselves as such — shills — are not really the peers of the vigilante consumer.

The NMM-Tabajara information-quality test labs, as you know, like to call this

… the “Astroturf Loophole,”  Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft arbitrage, or the Alberto Gonzalez theory of virtuous promiscuity: It’s a view of the world in which no role-tension or conflicts of interest exist among the purely personal and various institutional contexts in which we operate at various times during the day and week. “Sure, I work for Edelman Worldwide. But I am a person, too!”

But the main thing, Edelman reports, is that “The Person of the Year is You” meme, featured prominently and ad nauseam in national and international mass-market media like Time magazine, is still working, though its credibility declined 35% last year:

The remarkable rise of the “Person Like Yourself” as credible spokesperson from 2003-6 (from 22% to 68% in the US in that period) saw a decline this year (in the US, trusted by 51%), but still ranks as the #1 trusted spokesperson in most of the countries surveyed.

Did Edelman’s own rather public failures in this regard contribute to this precipitous — and welcome, if what underlies it is a demand from information consumers that information service providers consider the source — decline?

And to a marked shift in the balance of power in the global blogging industry’s Treaty of Tordesillos?

Or does the Ogilvy-Technorati transfer of allegiance not actually matter?

On expert spokespeople who “help the CEO carry the message because of their credentials,” see the curious case of Genevieve Bell, anthropologist, and Harvard Should Be Crimson Over IT Study.

Data-Security Breach Birth and the Reality-Based Life Coach

• Massachusetts attorney general to probe TJX data breach
• TJMaxx exposes customer data
• TJMaxx Hit With Data Breach
• Sensitive Data Stolen from TJMaxx Operator
• TJMaxx Reports Data Breach

TJX was down 1.78% on the news yesterday.

In the midst of which AOL Money and Finance’s Hilary Kramer — “financial editor and life coach” — shows up on Seeking Alpha (Feb. 9) with a love letter to the down-market shopping experience:

I’ll admit it. I love shopping at T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s, the two leading stores of The TJX Companies, Inc. (TJX). I don’t always find something good there, but it’s so much fun to stop in and see if there are any bargains; and when I do find something, it’s much more gratifying than finding that nice dress at Barney’s or Saks (SKS). In fact, I can go as far as saying that I have an addiction to browsing and buying at T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s.

In the last sentence of the “analysis,” Ms. Kramer finally gestures vaguely at the bull in the china shop:

Keep an eye out for fourth-quarter results on February 21: If the costs from the security breach prove enormous, you might see the stock dip because of these one-time expenses.

Millions of customer identities roaming dazed and confused through Hackolandia, like George Romero zombies.

Overpriced at $28 but a bargain if it hits $25.

Maybe: I am not a stock picker.

After all, ChoicePoint’s liability for a similar incident was only $15 million (Jan. 2006). But only a few half dozen hundreds of thousands of customers were affected in that case.

Still, you would think that a stock picker would at least make more than a passing reference to the major newsflow and reputational debacle of the day.

Does Ms. Kramer know something we do not?

Can all of this be blamed on an IT outsourcing provider, say?

WTF?

But maybe it’s just that I just don’t “get” the “financial life coaching” revolution, as exemplified by AOL and Weblog Inc.’s Blogging Stocks,

… a site that aggregates a series of blogs that discuss the stock performance of selected high-profile companies (e.g., Time Warner, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Wal-Mart), reports MediaWeek. The effort is a joint one between AOL and Weblogs Inc., which AOL bought in the fall.

As I noted before,

Consider that highlighted portion carefully, and the fact that the first entry that comes over the RSS wires into my personal Bloomberg box has to do with high hopes for new AOL Time Warner television programming. So, who does the selecting? And who does the blogging?

For TJX, looming liability:

The office of the Massachusetts Attorney General is leading a multi-state civil investigation into the security breach in January at retailer TJX which may have exposed personal data belonging to millions of customers to fraudsters.

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.

Merrill Lynch Gets Off Cheap

Wall Street tourists with a sense of humor have their picture taken with the anatomically correct other end of the landmark sculpture, which lives on the traffic median in front of the old Standard Oil Building.

Merrill Lynch settlement approved by judge: The bullish gang gets off with a settlement that provides investors with 6.25% of the damages they were seeking over improper nondisclosure of conflicts of interest. The lawyers got about $10 million in fees.

A US federal judge has given his approval to a $40 million settlement to end legal proceedings brought against Merrill Lynch by its mutual fund customers.

Merrill Lynch is in the news down here for employing the 20-something São Paulo real estate princeling and trained fashion stylist — the one who pressed the infamous YouTube SLAPP suit down here — as an investor banker in its São Paulo office.

An apparent conflict with the Reality Principle — what does a fashion stylist know, after a couple years of pondering plaid twills and pink as the new black, that we mere mortals need to take their rocket science B.A.’s to Wharton or MIT to learn by sweating blood? — it need not even bother to conceal.

Having friends in high places means never having to say you’re sorry.

Nearly 400,000 investors took legal action against the bank, accusing Merrill of failing to disclose conflicts of interest between its brokerage and underwriting businesses.

Pirated Vista Arrives in Brazil: Local Press

Trusted computing: Botando chifres em Longhorn.

Windows Vista pirata é vendido a R$ 15 em bancas de SP: Straight from the streets of São Paulo, the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper reports today that you can buy now Windows Vista (Paraguayuan Edition) for R$15, or around US$7 from street vendors..

Ele custa R$ 989. Mas, na rua Santa Ifigênia (região central de SP), um Windows Vista Ultimate “genérico” custa R$ 15. Já na avenida Paulista (zona sul de SP), o preço é mais “salgado”: R$ 20 –2% do valor de um original.

It costs R$989 [or about US$466 –about 2.6 minimum monthly salaries]. But on Santa Ifigênia Street (downtown São Paulo) you can buy a “generic” version of Windows Vista Ultimate for R$15. On the Av. Paulista (Southern Zone), the price is a little fancier: $R20 — 2% of the list price for the original.

Astroturf Alert: Wal-Mart Again

Renee Everett writes in to her local newspaper in Chico, Calif. to warn: Survey was P.R. for Wal-Mart

The Wal-Mart supercenter press in the E-R has surely prompted many people to form their opinions on this issue based on what they have read in this paper. So it is in the interest of fair, accurate reporting that I am writing to clarify a fact from your 2006 front-page article on the CEPCO Wal-Mart survey which, for some readers, seemed to be an “official” green light for the supercenter project.

A local paper had reported on environmental impact reports for a proposed Wal-Mart “supercenter” in the Central Valley town, home to what was, in my day, that infamous party school, Cal State Chico.

A competent editor, note, would have inserted the exact reference to the story in question: “… your 2006 front-page article [Vol. XI, No. 83, p. 1, Headline, Byline].”

Then again, this is a newspaper that uses “Dumb Ass Staff Writer” as its standard anonymous byline.

I swear to God. They do.

A search on the newspaper’s Web site did not turn up any article by that general description — or any article referencing CEPCO, for that matter. Bad indexing, it seems.

Readers should know that Jessica Freitas, who was identified in your article as a surveyor [sic; pollster, I gather, is what Renee means –Ed.] and CEPCO employee, was listed as public relations staff on The Linscheid Co. Web site, which is Bob Linscheid’s company.

This is an all-too-familiar astroturfing technique: Provide deliberately incomplete information in the sourcing of facts and opinions in order to “mislead without technically lying.”

Another case in point: Intel anthropologist Genevieve Bell is identified only as an “anthropologist” in the Great FOX-Intel Fake News Gambit.

And another: José Murilo Junior of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Global Voices Online and Santo Daime Dot Org.

See also The Legend of the Lurking Lobbyist.

Rio: Five Dead in Complexo Alemão

“A suspect is detained by police.”

Or is it eight dead? Rio: operação da polícia em morro deixa 5 mortos (O Dia): I saw this headline yesterday.

“Police operation leaves five dead in shantytown.”

I do not have time to follow the play-by-play on this situation, but I am trying at least to cross-reference these incidents with a fact that gets lost in the reporting on this issue: Some, even many, favelas are under the control of militias made up exclusively of off-duty PMs (military police) and bankrolled by numbers bankers and local politicans.

It is hard to put together a definitive tactical map of the situation, however.

The situation seems fluid, let us say. Mayor Maia’s ex-blog reported militias in control in

such shantytowns as Dendê, Mangueira [home of the legendary carnaval society], Cidade de Deus [of cinematic fame, yes], Morro dos Cabritos, S. Bento … the military police battalions in the vicinity natural tend to provide cover for this dynamic.

We should note, as well, that IstoÉ magazine reported from a neighborhood bordering the Vila Cruzeiro on Jan. 10.

… the Vila Cruzeiro, in which the cruelty of the traffic was exposed in 2002 when [Elias Maluco ordered the] torture and murder of [Globo Rio TV] journalist Tim Lopes. There, as in most areas dominated by the drug traffic, the press never ventures. On Jan. 10, IstoÉ was in a neighboring shantytown, where there is no drug traffic and where the traffickers fear to tread. The rules are laid down by off-duty, non-uniformed policemen who kicked out the traffic several years ago, putting an end to constant gun battles among criminal factions. It is a militia, as the paramilitary groups that now dominate 100 Rio shantytowns are known.

If you really want to track the multilateral conflict here, you need a list of the 100 militia-controlled shantytowns. Might make a nice sidebar, IstoÉ. Or you could at least point us to the source of that estimate so we can ask them.

Rio’s infamous BOPE was involved in the action at the Alemão Complex yesterday, one reads.

Bope had operated for 12 days in the complex back in October, according to local reports.

Amnesty International reported on BOPE actions in March 2006.

Terminou às 16h desta quarta-feira a Operação Abafa realizada desde o início da manhã pelas polícias Civil e Militar, na favela Vila Cruzeiro, no Complexo do Alemão, na Penha, Zona Norte. Segundo a Secretaria de Segurança Pública, cinco pessoas morreram. Informações iniciais da polícia davam conta de oito mortos, mas o número foi corrigido. Outras 15 pessoas foram presas, entre elas, o gerente-geral do tráfico da comunidade, conhecido como Doca. Ele é suspeito de ser um dos mandantes da onda de ataques criminosos do fim do ano passado.

Operation Abafa [– “surpress,” but abafar can also mean “cover up” –Ed.], which began in the early morning hours on Wednesday, wound up at 4 pm in the Vila Cruzeiro shantyown, in the Alemão Complex in Penha, Northern District of Rio de Janeiro. According to the Sect’y of Public Safety, five persons died. Initial reports from the police gave the figure as eight fataliies, but the number was corrected. Another 15 persons were arrested, among them the CEO of the drug traffic in the community, known as Doca. He is suspected of having masterminded the wave of criminal attacks in the city late last year. See also: Shootout closes Rio businesses

From the Autohagiography Watch: Microsoft

Wikipedia Anti-Autohagiographer of the Day (courtesy Não Acredito). Click to zoom.

Item: Microsoft Offers Cash for Wikipedia Edit (AP/Newsvine)

Microsoft Corp. landed in the Wikipedia doghouse Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.

Edelman-M$FT never learn, do they?

“Maximum scumbaggery to the bitter end,” that’s their motto.

Nor does Wikipedia, whose anonymous-contributor policy, like Windows, is engineered to be abused.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

They have? They certainly are not very efficient at it. I find Wikipedia authohagiographers — a hagiography is a saint’s life, written to promote the case for canonization — at work there all the time.

It is very, very easy to misrepresent yourself on Wikipedia, and the IP addresses that “identify” anonymous contributors identify preciely bupkis in most cases.

The latest trend: the fake NPOV dispute. You tag a story as biased and then filibuster the debate to keep the “disputed” label on what is actually a standards-adherent entry.

“We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach,” Wales said.

Translation: Microsoft did not pony up enough dough to the Wikimedia Foundation’s “charity” fund drive.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

BOT Gets The Trots; A Virtual Pattern?

My not even half-finished, and probably all wrong, “tech side of the exchange M&A scenario” concept map. NYSE Arca recently asked the SEC for an extension in implementing Reg NMS in the back office. Click to zoom

Cbot e-trading platform hit by glitches:

The Chicago Board of Trade (Cbot) says it is working with Atos Euronext Market Solutions (AEMS), which hosts its e-cbot electronic trading platform, to fix technical glitches that brought the system to its knees three times at the end of last week.

Interesting: In the Tokyo fat-finger glitch cases, it was almost impossible to try and found out who the vendor was: Fujitsu, which worked closely with Atos on .NET-based migration from legacy servers to a “virtualized” computing environment.

Fujitsu at one point acquired Atos Origin’s operations in Australia, in fact.

In the aftermath of that debacle, as I understand it, Japan’s capital markets authority opened up the tech market, once controlled by a handful of zaibatsus, to foreign competition, including the pan-Nordic exchange operator and trading platform in-a-boxer OMX.

OMX succeeded, it seems to me, in driving Atos Origin out of its Nordic regional market.

May 2005 – Atos Origin sells its activities in the Nordic region, which became part of the company with the acquisition of Sema Group, to WM-data.

But that may be too sloppy a way of looking at it.

OMX has had a few trading-platform hiccups itself, but seemed to handle them reasonably well. As I wrote but now cannot find to link to. Recent platform wins include Osaka, DIFX and the Borsa Italiana, I note.

I actually ran into — well, strolled past — Magnus Bocker in the hall at the WFE meeting in São Paulo a while back. Interesting man.

Athos also acquired portions of the ill-fated KPMG [cough:abramoff] — other parts of which merged with an E&Y consulting practice to become Bearing Point, which now partners with Google.

Part of the reason the Deutsche Borse-Euronext tie-up failed to go through, one reads, was “disagreements over IT ‘synergies.‘”

DB later offered concessions on those points, however.

AtosEuronext had problems in Malaysia, too.

In a statement Cbot COO Bryan Durkin says the exchange “has identified an issue with our trading host” which forced it to periodically suspend trading on the e-cbot platform.

Ouch. For “periodically” understand “repeatedly.”

Here is the full statement from the BOT COO, by the way.

The poor guy: he is trying to get a merger done with the Merc, after all, right? Yaaaagh! Bring me a double Scotch and a tranquilizer!

The new system, which connects to Euronext Liffe, was rolled out in October.

Brazil: The Guarantors of Internet Ungovernability

At the boteco, reading up on the YouTube scandal. Carta Capital magazine misses the point.

CartaCapital magazine, published here in São Paulo, is out with its new issue and its online poll of the week:

Você acha que a internet pode ser controlada?

“Can the Internet be controlled?”

The poll is running about 75% “no” at the moment.

But this is precisely the wrong question.

Carta Capital has fallen into the trap of knee-jerk libertarianism here, I think — a Manichean allegory of “control” versus “freedom” in which we forget to ask “controlled by whom?” and “freedom for whom, to do what, to whom?”

The question is, can the Internet be governed?

And governed democratically, rather than misgoverned by the Lords of Misrule — predatory private interests that consider themselves above the democratic rule of law?

The Beasts of No Nation?

That is, subjected to democratic control rather than the will to power of multinational corporations who seek to fence it off as a private “business ecosystem” — or rather, as a private game reserve, as I like to say.

A private game reserve where massively corrupt antidemocrats [cough:abramoff] — people who want to subordinate public services, democratically governed, to private commercial interests — go to shoot game birds that have had their wings clipped.

And one another.

Because that is what James Moore’s idea of the “business ecosystem,” as flacked for by the Berkman Center for the Intel-Inside Society, really amounts to.

Because an “ecosystem” controlled by monopolies is not sustainable. The metaphor is entirely disingenuous.

In other words, can the Internet be governed by the user and for the user?

Both the Brazilian government and Google clearly think that it can.