Journalist Mauro Carrara make some interesting claims today about a recent wave of spurious scandalmongering and intensely biased reporting by the major news outlets here in Brazil.
Specifically, that the campaign, launched at the recent Forum on Democracy and Freedom of Expression, hosted by the newly coined Instituto Milennium — really just an outgrowth of the Instituto para Estudos Empresariais (IEE), whose recent past president, Paulo Uebel, is its CEO — is the brainchild of political psychologist Drew Western of Westen Strategies, author of The Political Brain.
And is named after Operation Desert Storm.
Whether Westen has been specifically retained by the opposition parties is not entirely clear from this report, but it seems not. It would be illegal.
I have always wanted to know more about the role of American political consultants here. The strategies are so very familiar from what Republican neonconservative strategists and, more recently, Democratic neoconservative strategists like Howard Dean, have cooked up over the years.
A remarkable view of U.S. political consultants in action in Bolivian presidential elections the documentary Our Brand is Crisis, featuring, among others, James Carville and Bush ibn Bush speechwriter Bob Shrum. Rent this movie now, Don Aplin.
They won they election, but not long after good old Goni fled the country amid corruption charges, bank failures, and a war in the streets between the army and the national police. He settled into a nice think tank fellowship at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard where he could lunch with Henry “Nuke Hanoi” Kissinger..
(Harvard was a co-sponsor of the Instituto Millenium event on democracy and freedom of expression for media latifúndios. You should look into Harvard’s “public diplomacy” contracts with the government over the last few years.)
I actually wrote to some of these consultancies in 2006 to ask them about their activities in Latin America that year.
James Carville’s office quickly denied any activity on the other side of the Mexicali-Calexico border.
Dick Morris later admitted publicly to having devised media campaigns for the PAN political party of Mexico and industrial confederations that supported it — which is against Mexican law. He and Rob Allyn snuck into the country under Mexican-sounding pseudonyms. See
The Instituto Millenium itself — its board dominated by the two leading media oligopolies, Globo and Abril — has close and immediate ties to a K Street front for the Cato Institute and various foundations on the extreme right, as I have been writing about for Luosophone friends.
Its editorial board comprises the publisher of Veja magazine and a senior content manager at the Estado de S. Paulo — both firms with open ties to Opus Dei.
Click to zoom. (Hint: right-click, open image in new tab, remove the sizing parameters from the URL, and reload.)
Fiscal council member Odemiro Fonseca provided the first indications of this link:
The main function of the two-man “big store” is to support the Red Liberal de la America Latina (RELIAL), a network of political parties and associated NGOs and think thanks directly bankrolled by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
Alejandro Chafuen is the key man, serving as founding trustee of a number of these interlocking organizations.
In Brazil, the DEM-PFL (former Party of the Liberal Front, descended from ARENA, the party of the generalíssimos in the Potemkin congress during the dicatorship) is a member. In Mexico, where RELIAL is based, PANAL, the party of national teachers union (SNTE) president-for-life Esther Elba Gordillo — Jimmy Hoffa is alive and well and living as an Imelda Marcos impersonator in Mexico City — is an affiliate.
Just as Cato specializes in credentialing media talking heads and pundits who can semi-plausibly be fobbed off as independent analysts, so have members of the Instituto Millenium been riding a tank in the general’s rank of the recent Operation Brazilian Desert Storm.
(Cerrado is a dense scrubland typical of central Goias, where the federal capital is located.)
“Tempestade no Cerrado”: é o apelido que ganhou nas redações a operação de bombardeio midiático sobre o governo Lula, deflagrada nesta primeira quinzena de Março, após o convescote promovido pelo Instituto Millenium.
Storm over the Cerrado is the nickname used in the newsrooms to describe the media bombardment of the Lula government, touched off in the last two weeks after the rally promoted by the Instituto Millenium.
A expressão é inspirada na operação “Tempestade no Deserto”, realizada em fevereiro de 1991, durante a Guerra do Golfo.
The expression is inspired by Operation Desert Storm of February 1991.
Liderada pelo general norte-americano Norman Schwarzkopf, a ação militar destruiu parcela significativa das forças iraquianas. Estima-se que 70 mil pessoas morreram em decorrência da ofensiva.
What Desert Storm was.
A ordem nas redações da Editora Abril, de O Globo, do Estadão e da Folha de S. Paulo é disparar sem piedade, dia e noite, sem pausas, contra o presidente, contra Dilma Roussef e contra o Partido dos Trabalhadores.
The standing order at Editora Abril, O Globo, the Estado de S. Paulo and the Folha de S. Paulo is to keep the guns blazing day and night against the president, his chosen successor and his party.
A meta é produzir uma onda de fogo tão intensa que seja impossível ao governo responder pontualmente às denúncias e provocações.
The goal is to produce a barrage so intense that it will be impossible for the government to respond one by one to the allegations and provocations.
Yes, this is the Multiple Untruth strategy:
… presenting so many statements that they are impossible to keep in the mind at once. It may be possible to select a small number of statements and show them to be false, but this will give the impression that only those statements are false.
Each of the thousand points of light in the international partisan-NGO network can be cited as an apparently independent source of each untruth, compounding the effect, since many more proponents of each untruth will demand that their arguments be addressed.
As conversas tensas nos “aquários” do editores terminam com o repasse verbal da cartilha de ataque.
Tense conversations in the editorial aquariums conclude with the oral transmission of the day’s talking points.
I will skip over the detailed outline of the strategy.
Quem está por trás
Who’s Behind It
The difference between the GOP and the Democrats is an optical illusion.
Parte da estratégia tucano-midiática foi traçada por Drew Westen, norte-americano que se diz neurocientista e costuma prestar serviços de cunho eleitoral.
Part of the joint Social Democrat/mass media strategy was outlined by Drew Westen, an American who calls himself a neuroscientist and often provides political consulting services.
É autor do livro The Political Brain, que andou pela escrivaninha de José Serra no primeiro semestre do ano passado.
He is the author of The Political Brain, a book seen sitting on José Serra’s desk early last year.
A tropicalização do projeto golpista vem sendo desenvolvida pelo “cientista político” Alberto Carlos Almeida, contratado a peso de ouro para formular diariamente a tática de combate ao governo.
The tropicalization of this antidemocratic project is being developed by “political scientist” Alberto Carlos Almeida, hired for his own weight in gold to organize the movement’s tactics on a day to day basis.
Almeida escreveu Por que Lula? e A cabeça do brasileiro, livros que o governador de São Paulo afirma ter lido em suas madrugadas insones.
Almeida is the author of Why Lula? and The Brazilian Mind, books the governor of São Paulo admits having read during sleepless nights.
Co-author of The Brazilian Mind was Clifford Young of IPSOS Public Affairs, an old-school Chicago Boy and former chief economist of Banco Bradesco, who was recently interviewed prominently in Globo’s Época newsweekly.
His role in writing the book is downplayed into pica print because, well, to be honest, they cordially hate our guts down here after the Bush bin Bush Decade.
Almeida is head of the polling firm Instituto Análise of Rio, a division of Virtu Análise e Estratégia Ltda.
(The literary reference is to Nicolá Macchiavelli.)
He is the tropical equivalent of the Diebold president who committed himself to delivering Ohio to Bush, except that these people do not even try to be discrete about it. They believe the Brazilian mind is too feeble to grok what they are up to.
If the last national election is any indication, they are dead wrong.
In a recent push poll conducted for Millenium, Almeida’s firm asked some Brazilian or other (the methodology was not published) whether they agreed with the (nonexistent) proposal to nationalize the Globo network.
Some 37% supposedly said yes.
The nationalization of Globo is not even a remote possibility, but the appearance of this thesis in the results of scientific-looking poll lends credibility to the perception of a real and present danger from the “government of the terrorists,” while also painting Globo-haters as a (dangerously radical) minority.
If this were New Hampshire, these people would be posting bail.
Future Related Research Findings
I am digging up my notes on the Centro Interamericano de (In)gerencia Política at Florida International University.
I have translated quite a few press clipping about one of its fellows and consultants in Colombia, J.J. Rendón, from El Tiempo — like O Globo (and USA Today and Libération), a client of Innovation Internacional, a media consultancy founded by professors at the Opus Dei-endowed Universidad de Navarra – Cambio and Semana.
For example:
A great Rendonian triumph was the hoax editorial by Gaviria of the Liberals in Comment in Free (Guardian U.K.). A hoax in that the man did not write it:
The center will sponsor an international congress on Democracia 2.0 in May, in Mexico.
In my extensive studies of the rhetoric of the technological sublime in new media press releases — key memes are “revolution” and (the iPhone) “magic” — I have tended to find that “2.0,” like the neo- in neoliberal and neoconservative , tends to be Newspeak for “the opposite of” or “anti-.”
Vaguely Related Concluding Anecdote on Corporate Neurolinguistic Shamans
When I worked at the late — if not great then at least lovingly labored over by very fine and competent people — Internet World, I once attended a Nielsen//Net Ratings seminar-presser on the company’s People Meter technology.
The PM was going to be a wearable monitor that would detect all media to which the user is exposed during the day, then sync to a server like a Palm or Pocket PC or Symbian device at night.
If you walk into a bodega and “Livin’ La Vida Loca” is playing on the radio while Fox News blares from the TV, both are credited to your current account of multimedia consumption.
It was vaporware at that point, and I do not know if they ever got it out into the field, to be honest, but the idea was that in the future, all sorts of ambient media — including billboards — would actively beam their info to the gizmo, allowing a complete picture of The Buzz to be obtained.
The most amusing part of the day was the keynote speech by some corporate anthropologist who went by the moniker of Dr. Bob or Dr. Steve or some such thing.
To an audience consisting mostly of regional sales managers — you know the types — Dr. Bob went off into this astonishing rant about how drinking “the tea” with an Amazonian shaman taught him all about how the message has to be delivered “straight to the forebrain at the speed of thought,” long before memory and ratiocination can kick in.
It was like watching The Clash perform before the Cuban-American Chamber of Commerce, or Divine giving away the bride at the Schwarzenneger-Kennedy nuptials. Sullen incomprehension. Absolutely hilarious.
Filed under: Uncategorized
