“If the U.S. Ambassador Was Meeting With Separatists, Morales Was Right To Kick Him Out”

Vi o Mundo notes this comment on the expulsion of the American ambassador in Boliva by Brazil’s President da Silva, in an interview with TV Brasil.

The U.S. Dept. of State ought to as well.

We already pay them plenty of taxes to pay attention to things like this, but apparently they are spending all the money on Radio Hurra — “Madonna records and happy talk fake news programming will sow the seeds of peace and prosperity!” — and not really paying attention.

The President of Brazil boasts of calling the U.S. ambassador on the carpet, and says Morales should, too, if the U.S. ambassador was doing what Morales said he was doing. See also

• Expelled, The “Balkanizer of Bolivia”

TV Brasil: O Evo Morales acusa o governo dos Estados Unidos de interferir na vida interna na Bolívia, de estimular essa rebelião em Santa Cruz e em outras províncias da região. O Brasil tem boas relações com os Estados Unidos, o senhor inclusive tem excelente relação com o presidente Bush; o senhor chegou a conversar com as autoridades americanas ou com o Bush sobre esse problema na Bolívia?

TV Brasil: Morales accuses the U.S. government of meddling in the internal affairs of Bolivia, of stimulating this rebellion in Santa Cruz and other provinces in the region. Brazil has good relations with the U.S., and you are on excellent terms with Bush. Have you spoken to American officials or Bush about this Bolivian problem?

Lula: Eu conversei várias vezes com o Bush, até a pedido do Evo Morales para que os Estados Unidos aprovassem rapidamente as tarifas especiais para determinados produtos bolivianos e está para ser aprovada agora, mas como houve essa expulsão do embaixador eu penso que agora essas coisas podem ficar paralisadas. Se for verdade que o embaixador dos Estados Unidos fazia reunião com a oposição do Evo Morales, o Evo está correto de mandá-lo embora. O papel de embaixador não é fazer política dentro do país, não. Ele está como representante do seu país, numa relação de Estado com Estado, ele representa o Estado.

Lula da Silva: I spoke several times with Bush, including about Morales’ request that the U.S. speed up approval for special tariffs on certain Bolivian products, which is due to be approved soon, but now, with this expulsion of the ambassador, I think those things might come to a halt. If it is true that the U.S. ambassador was meeting with the opposition to Morales, then Morales was right to kick him out. It is definitely not an ambassador’s role to engage in politics inside the country. He is there representing his country, in a relationship between one state and another, he is representing the State.

Globo: “Rival Network Built on Cali Cocaine Money”

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

O Globo reports on charges made by Rio de Janeiro mayor Cesar “The Naked” Maia against Marcelo Crivella, a candidate to replace him.

Crivella is (was) a bishop in the Universal Church, a wealthy and influential Protestant denomination with roots in the pioneering televangelism of Aimee Semple MacPherson, in some sense. Quite a history, that.

The Universal Church also owns Record, a commercial network bent on overtaking Globo in the ratings.

Which may be why O Globo treats this reheated gabbling rumor — you can see it on YouTube! — as a legitimate news story, even though it offers no new information, and goes on to spill an enormous amount of ink amplifying the Naked Mayor’s quackings.

Welcome to the Brazilian political silly season.

Maia dredges up charges that the Universal Church owes its wealth to laundering money for the Cali cocaine cartel, and that its leaders engaged in child-fucking on an industrial scale, and stuff like that. The source of these charges has a dubious history himself.

Maia — his detractors call him “The King of the Factoid” — is a fascinating, and ultimately repugnant, character, a confessed admirer of U.S. political consultant Dick Morris, as I read in the mayor’s famous “ex-blog” daily political newsletter.

(The Naked Mayor seems to spend more time composing this daily dose of agitprop, written in the exclamation mark-riddled style of a Mexican tabloid, than he does governing!!!!!)

The guy will pretty much say anything.

If you read the “ex-blog” regularly, for example, you will find Maia repeating the factoid according to which the ruling PT conspired with the PCC criminal organization and the FARC guerrilla movement in Colombia to murder São Paulo police in May 2006.

In a plot to harm the political prospects of the PSDB-PFL presidential candidate in the national elections that year. (Maia’s son Rodrigo is the national president of the DEM (ex-PFL) party now.) Gabbling bullshit of that sort.

O prefeito Cesar Maia (DEM), que apóia a candidata Solange Amaral, divulgou ontem em seu ex-blog denúncias feitas pelo pastor Caio Fábio contra a Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus para atacar a candidatura a prefeito de Marcelo Crivella (PRB). Cesar traz à tona denúncias de envolvimento da Universal com o narcotráfico feitas por Caio Fábio, que o prefeito chama de “um líder evangélico de esquerda e dirigente do Viva Rio que foi prestigiado até os anos 90″ e que foi acusado depois de usar recursos de programas sociais.

Mayor Cesar Maia (ex-PFL), who supports mayoral candidate Solange Amaral (ex-PFL), published charges against mayoral candidate Marcelo Crivella (PRB) on his “ex-blog” yesterday that were previously made by pastor Caio Fábio. Maia recycled charges that the Universal Church is involved with narcotrafficking, made by a pastor whom the mayor calls “a leftist evangelical leader and director of the Viva Rio NGO who enjoyed some prestige up until the 1990s,” and who was later charged with misusing funds allocated to social programs.

Kupfer: Get Shorty and the Prophets of Doom

Beware Shorty and the prophets of doom, noted Brazilian columnist advises

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

Cuidado com os catastrofistas: Beware false prophets of doom, says Brazilian business columnist José Paulo Kupfer of the iG news portal.

They could be short and looking to profit from the herd effect.

Wise advice.

This is clearly a rich environment for those of us on the lookout for case studies in the journalism of moral panic.

You do not hear much about Shorty — short sellers engaged in pumping and dumping — in the Brazilian financial press, but in the current situation, you are now starting to hear some agitated talk about getting the stumpy sumbitch.

After all, the SEC is resuming its 24-hour surveillance on Shorty these days as well. It will be interesting to see what Gary Weis — who rails against  people he views as manipulating the phantom menace of short selling as the origin of all evil — has to say on the subject.

As to pumping and dumping in the yellow press, however, it’s practically the second national sport down here, after futebol.

My hasty translation.

Das muitas novidades da atual crise financeira global, uma que chama a atenção é a queda da regra do silêncio sobre instituições em dificuldades. O paradigma quebrado é o de que não se devem amplificar as informações sobre as dificuldades de um banco porque é aí mesmo que ele escorre pelo ralo.

Among the many novel aspects of the current global financial crisis, one that calls attention is the death of the rule of silence regarding troubled financial institutions. The rule being broken here is that too much information about the difficulties of a bank can send it right down the drain.

Esse tipo de comportamento antigo, mais cauteloso e discreto, inclusive e sobretudo na imprensa, também escorreu pelo ralo, nesta crise. Entrou em cena a novidade do anúncio da fila dos afogados. Realmente, no mesmo momento em que as atenções – e as notícias – se concentravam nos esforços para salvar o Lehman Brothers, se anunciava, em letras ampliadas, que a Merril Lynch e a AIG eram os próximos.

This old-fashioned style, more cautious and more discrete, has also gone down the drain, above all in the press, in the current crisis. For the first we, we see reports on who is next in line to go under. At the same time that attention, and news, focused on efforts to save Lehman Bros., it was being widely and loudly reported that Merrill Lunch and AIG were next.