Brazil, the BSA and Big, Bad Tobacco

I call it the unholy pentagram and I am really shocked at some of its propaganda practices.

One of its local partners, for example, made — and publicly announced, in an obscure corner of its usability nightmre Web site — a deal with Brazil’s leading business dailies to publish “special sections” promoting its aims.

The first one arrived on Monday and failed to observe every single ethical tenet of sponsored content known to man since the dawn of time. It was nauseating.

In this “special section” — graphicall identical in every way to the rest of the newspaper except for the word “special” on the cover and inside pages, without further explanation — pure PR hackery-flackery of the kind you have read in a billion press releases since the late 1990s was run anonymously beside bylined articles by Valor staffers.

And wait a minute, some of these Valor staffers turned out to be Valor “contributors” whose principal meal ticket is their senior partnership in PR firms at which they specialize in placing sponsored content while concealing the fact of its sponsorship from the reader. Professional liars, that is.

You google them up and on the first page of  Google resultes they google up as journalists. Then you actually dig for information and find that the are functioning as an outsourced PR agency of another outsourced PR agency. The have never written a journalistic piece in their life. They are the puff-piece workers of the new Global Lower East Side as seen in Godfather II.

Not surprising to find Globo — joint owner of Valor with the Folha-UOL group — service as mouthpiece to this media blitz

Anchoring this gross debacle was a full-page ad by Souza Cruz — Brazilian subsidiary of British American Tobacco (the BAT man of the network diagram).  The page chunders every sophomoric libertarian platitude that the Cato Institute has been peddling for years under the guise of its heroic struggle against Calvinism and Calvin Coolidge.

The special section in Valor, it seems, was timed to coincide with the kick-off of a campaign for autoregulation of the Brazilian securities industry, in fact. Like the NYSE-Euronext, the BM&FBovespa — the merged commodities and securities exchanges — has launched its bid and produced a plan that owes a lot to the NSYE Regulation model.

This may very be an effective model for a mega-exchange operating in developed markets, but let me tell you some time aqbout my visito to the Stock Market of Pernambuco.

The exchanges here are energetic and committed to innovation, but they remain well behind the curve. The dream of unifying exchanges across the Mercosul nations — perhaps even as an alternative to the Mercosul — is lovely but I will believe it when I see it.

In the meantime, one of the participants in this Freedom Brigade, the Association of Brazilian Software FIrms,  has an interesting story to tell about its own development. I translate for lack of anything else to do.

In 1986, we founded ABES. We wanted an open market, but what we actually experienced was a restrictive environment that made it impossible for Brazil to compete, due to its technical backwardness. The native industry inisted on focusing all its efforts on products compatible with MS-DOS, creating a captive market.

A year later, we passed Law 7646/87, later revoked with the passage of Law 9609/98. Timidly, took its first baby steps, even as it became clear how insidious an enemy piracy would prove to be.

In 1988 we launched an educational campaign, and then in 1989 we filed suit against other companies. Black  & Decker, Sharp and Ceras Johnson were some of the higher profile names to suffer fines.

In 1990, the Collor government made grand gestures toward leading Brazil into the age of globaliztioh, and the Consumer Defese Code was passed. A ABES and its allies courted politicians through the National Computer Science Confederation  (CONIN), hoping to loosen, at least, the grip of the captive market ojn our businesses. Protectionism, as it turned out, did not work.

Two years later, the captive market is repealed to the great relief of all IT users. Things really started to change now and many native software publishers stared taking their products international. Along this two-way street, foreign firms set up in Brasil and the Brazilian user started being able to get his mitts on stuff he could once only obtain in the black market.

Since the arrival of Big Tech, everything has been peachy keen — I gist. The ABES, in its current incarnation, was founded on 13 November 2002in the Moema district of São Paulo.