Rio | New Man With Plan For Van

Black-market van stuffed with 10 armed, black-clad corpses, December 2007, Rio

Source:  R7.

On December 5. Rio de Janeiro mayor Eduardo Paes announced the creation of a special office of supplementary public transportation, led by state judicial police official Cláudio Ferraz, former commander of the anti-organized crime bureau that has pursued the militias of Rio.

The alternative van service racket is one of many money-making schemes of criminal paramilitary organizations, made up of policemen, jail guards, and soldiers, especially in the Western Zone.

Moto taxis serving areas where vans cannot reach are also very popular. 

Bingo! | Delta Goes Down

Source: Delta defines bankruptcy recovery plan — Portal ClippingMP.

In the annals of contemporary Brazilian bribery scandals, probably none are more painful than the saga of the public works contractor Delta and its ties to organized crime boss Carlinhos Cachoeira — Charlie Waterfall, whose principal business is the murky world of smuggling, numbers racketeering, and “nickel-hunter” gambling machines.

One of Brazil’s largest contractors, Delta had been a star player in the PAC — the federal growth acceleration program — and was afforded the honor of joining the consortium to rebuild the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.

Now, it would be difficult for it to obtain a bicycle-powered newspaper route.

Delta has since voluntarily withdrawn from Maracanã and most other projects.

A congressional investigation is underway — wrapping up early, actually, after company officials and other parties took the local equivalent of the Fifth — but federal police say they have ample evidence of wrongdoing — including the involvement of journalists in character assassinations of Mr. Waterfall’s enemies..

Delta executives appeared on court-ordered wiretaps discussing how to cheat federal contract bidding procedures and infiltrate regulatory agencies, among other things.

And so the rise and fall of Delta turns out to be a textbook case of moral hazard.

Delta intends to pay its non-financial creditors with equipment. Its plan is to reduce its inventory of idle equipment by reducing the number of projects contracted for since January 2012 by  50%. Banks and financial institutions will receive payment starting in June 2014,  payable in 72 monthly installments and corrected by CDI+1%, according to a recovery plan filed yesterday in a Rio de Janeiro court. The creditors assembly is scheduled for December 7. Bradesco is the company’s largest creditor.

Red Bull | The Way of Karma Cola

Meio & Mensagem:

Brazil’s federal advertising regulator bans a commercial for Red Bull involving the image of Jesus. News sites linking to the YouTube upload of the spot are advised that the company has blocked the video on intellectual property grounds.

I translate.

After receiving hundreds of protests, Conar today — [March 27] — decided to   pela bar airing of the Red Bull commerce that portrays an animated Christ figure walking on water. Conar ruled that the spot was disrespectful to religion.

The ban was passed by a simple majority of the 15 commissions assembled at Conar’s ethics body in São Paulo to vote.

The commercial is a foreign production, created by the Austrian agency Kastner & Partners, and generated a great deal of controversy in Brazil, particularly on religious Web sites and blogs. In Brazil, the Red Bull account is managed by Loducca, which imported the spot and brokered the air time.

Civita Dei | Notes on The Brazilian Education Lobby

Brasil Escola — an educational publication of Brazil’s Record media group — observes, correctly, a major source of difficulty in trying to cover, in any comprehensive way, the actions of corporate, private and third-sector lobbies, and combinations thereof.

The trouble is that the lobbying industry here is just about as unregulated as Liberty Valence. I translate:

The term “lobby” is frequently heard in the political milieu. Sadly, however, most people hold an incorrect view of the term’s meaning.

First of all, we should understand that lobbying is nothing more than the bringing of political pressure by groups seeking to influence official policy for their own ends, whether openly or in secret.

Lobbying is a very natural activity, something we all do. Examples include a son trying to get his father to increase his allowance, or a union debating improved working conditions.  In the U.S., lobbying is openly recognized  and even regulated by law. Lobbying is acknowledged as an important part of the political process.

Some experts believe that lobbying should not sneak in  through the back door, which only supports accusations of improprieties.  According to Maria Coeli Simões Pires, secretary of regional development and urban policy for the government of Minas Gerais, there are no angels in the political world, and no demons as well, merely interests, chief of which are economic interests. Viewed this way, lobbying must unlink itself from illegalities, since defending special interests is not only not illegal but rather a fundamental right.

First of all, in the case of «edutainment» policy, what groups seek to influence federal, state and local education policy in Brazil, and what are their respective agenda and tactics? The answer involves sophisticated governance structures set up to facilitate private- and third-sector collaboration with municipal, state, and federal bodies and private enterprise.

«Program, get your program, you can’t tell the players without a program!”

Selecting key-man nodes in publicly available social networks and traversing their relationships — above, aa chain leading to international philanthropy by Sylvan Laureate — is a legitimate method, but also very labor-intensive.

I propose using automated «beat-building» techniques to obrain an overview of the sector.

First, relevant and useful Web sites are selected and crawled, breadth-firt — using NaviCrawler or WIRE, in my case — and a link ecology analysis is performed, using Pajek, Gephi and yEd.

Then, using yEd, basic social network characteristics can be diagrammed and pondered visually.

VC | Silicon Alley Flies South for the Winter

Item:

• Fundos do Vale do Silício bancam novatas do Brasil | Valor Econômico.

Do not make the mistake I always do, referring to the Northern California innovation fault line as «Vale do Silicone».

«Silicone» is for breast implants.

According to Brazil’s premier business daily, there is more and more foreign capital chasing Brazilian tech startups. I  translate in haste:

The same dollars that contributed to the success stories of the Silicon Valley, such as Google e o Facebook, is starting to irrigate the fields of Brazilian startups. Californian funds began backing Brazilian firms in 2008, but this type of investment has grown more common starting last year.

Seven investors stand out in this scenario: Redpoint Ventures, BV Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Tiger Global Management [*], Venture Capital Group and 500Startups.

In all, the funds have taken stakes in 20 startups, most, or rather, almost all of them Internet companies. It is not possible to know how much these funds have invested to date, because most of this information remains confidential. In general, the funds invest in what is known in the U.S. as Series A investments of between US$1 million and US$10 million.

The most attractive areas for these startups are e-commerce, online marketplaces, outsourced financial and customer services, e-learning, social networks and mobile software development.

Shoes4You, for example, a buyers club for shoes and accessories, has received backing from Accel Partners  — an investor in Facebook and Groupon — as well as from Redpoint Ventures — Netflix — and Flybridge Capital Partners. Olivier Grinda, CEO of Shoes4You, finds the experience different from the process other startups undergo. “The Silicon Valley investor looks at the business from a long-term point of view, between 10 and 20 years.  Care is taken to align perspectives of startup and investor, though without the demand for immediate revenues and cash flows.

Flybridge partner Jon Karlen has traveled to Brazil three times already this year in search of e-learning, social network and mobile software opportunities The fund has $560 million in assets, $100 million of which it plans to spend in Brazil in coming years. To date, it has invested in four Brazilian companies.

With US$ 3 bilion in assets, Redpoint Venture is bullish on Brazil, where it currently has stakes in seven companies. .”We have set aside 10% of our portfolio for Brazilian deals, but expect to exceed that proportion in just a few year,” say founding partner Jeff Brody. Interest is so high that Redpoint partnered with  BV Capital — another U.S. fund, with US$ 300 million — to create eVentures Redpoint.

The partnership was announced just a week or so ago.

The rise of billion-dollar companies in the Brazilian e-commerce market, such as Netshoes, has attracted European and Latin American groups looking to diversify …

From the joint venture’s inaugural press release:

Headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Redpoint eVentures will be led by founding partners Yann de Vries and Anderson Thees. Through Redpoint eVentures, Redpoint and eVentures’ combined global expertise in Consumer Internet, e-commerce, mobile, media and cloud services will be made available to local entrepreneurs. The firm will support promising start-ups by sharing international best practices as well as providing access to financing, talent and strategic partnerships.

The development of Redpoint eVentures was three years in the making, following dozens of flights back and forth from Silicon Valley to Brazil as well as three promising local investments (Viajanet, Grupo Xango and Shoes4you). Co-founder of Redpoint, Jeff Brody, is convinced that having an established local presence is critical to long-term success, explaining,

“We’ve learned in China that to be truly effective finding opportunities and supporting entrepreneurs, one needs to be established on the ground, rather than flying back and forth every couple of weeks – focus and access are critical to success. Now that we have assembled a great local team in Sao Paulo, we are ready to continue our efforts to scale across the region.”

FSP: FBI Sent Bait for Hate to Haití Não É Aqui

Exit polls show Chávez referendum victory. But Chávez had already conceded quote your shitty little victory end-quote by then. O Globo was worse: CHÁVEZ WON BY CHEATING! (Hugo lost.)

The Bergen Record newspaper in New Jersey reviewed Mr. Turner’s court documents and found the FBI had admonished Mr. Turner in July 2007 for his rhetoric and “the potential of it inciting acts of violence” but continued to use him. The FBI also paid Mr. Turner to meet with a wealthy, white supremacist in Brazil.

An item today from the Sunday Folha de S. Paulo tends to reinforce the deep prejudice of every New Yorker: that New Jersey is a mobbed-up banana republic — run out of the Bing of Tony Soprano and Co. –where we are frightened to set foot. (I have ridden PATH exactly twice in 13 years.)

The item also reflects on the quality of journalism at the often-ridiculed FSP.

The local fishwrap presents information that is readily available in the public domain as <based on secret sources>.

Eu, hein? (Roughly, <pull the other one.>

This story was broken by 419 news sources (Google News results) on November 30, 2009. Two weeks ago.

And the FSP is regurgitating it as a red-hot scoop involving investigative reporting of the most romantic kind.

Eu, hein? (Roughly, <there is one born every minute>.

O FBI, a polícia federal norte-americana, ajudou a bancar a ida ao Brasil de um radialista e blogueiro radical de extrema direita de Nova Jersey como isca para atrair e identificar grupos extremistas brasileiros contrários aos Estados Unidos, de acordo com pessoas que tiveram acesso a documentos do governo norte-americano.

The FBI … helped bankroll a visit to Brazil of a white-supremacist radio personality and blogger from New Jersey as bait designed to attract and identify Brazilian extremist groups who oppose the U.S., according to persons who had access to U.S. government documents.

According to the dozens of other journalists — I can make a list of their bylines if you like — who covered the trial of this FBI informant code-named <Valhalla> and requested copies from the court clerk. (I bet you can even download them from the Internet for a minimal fee to cover court expenses.)

Harold “Hal” Turner, 47, viajou a Curitiba, no Paraná, em 2005, onde se apresentou como líder da National Alliance, um dos maiores grupos de supremacistas brancos dos EUA. Ali, se encontrou com um simpatizante brasileiro, com quem teria discutido doação de US$ 1 milhão à causa americana, e com um representante da Sociedade Árabe Brasileira.

Hal Turner, 47, traveled to Curitiba, Paraná, in 2005, where he represented himself as leader of the National Alliance, one of the largest white-supremacist groups in the U.S. There, he met with a Brazilian sympathizer, with whom he allegedly discussed a US1$ million donation to the cause, as well as a representative of the Brazilian-Arab Society.

The Brazilian Goddamn Gummint as Single-Payer Broadband Provider

From the Correio Braziliense — not a notorious pro-government mouthpiece, exactly — today, under the headline <Popular Capitalism>:

O governo federal está metido numa boa empreitada: criar as condições para universalizar o acesso à internet de alta velocidade. Avalia inclusive entrar no mercado de provimento ao consumidor final. A iniciativa deverá servir, pelo menos, para forçar as companhias de telecomunicações a ampliar os serviços e baixar os preços. Se conseguir avançar aí, Lula merecerá aplausos efusivos.

The federal government is engaged in a positive initiative: creating the conditions needed to universalize high-speed Internet access. It is even mulling entering the market for provision of service to the end consumer. This initiative should, at least, force the telecoms to broaden their service offerings and lower their prices. If he succeeds in making an advances in this area, President da Silva (Lula) will deserve effusive applause.

On recent outrageous QoS deficits:

• Speedy Sputters Under Hack Attack!

I was just reminiscing with my wife about the time I worked as a presentation artist for league-chart investment banks in New York in the late 1990s, and all the time I spent working on Brazilian privatizations.

Ten years on, the results speak for themselves, especially in the telephony, Internet, energy and water-sewer areas.

I base that judgment on having lived for several years in a São Paulo loft hooked up to these leaky, sludge-plugged pipes at usurious prices.

In a related development, enabling legislation for Broadband Over Powerlines (BPL) is on the way after a long push through sluggish legislative pipes, one reads.

Lies, Damned Lies and Latin American Opinion Polling: A Case in Point?

Conversa Afiada is the PSDB and mainstream-media bashing blog of Record TV interviewer Paulo Henrique Amorim. Tends to resort to Page Six prose style.

In suggesting that Brazil’s major media cartels still lie, cheat and purvey disinformation for the sake of a specific political clientele (the right and center-right), the following item is not atypical of Amorim.

Denúncia: FHC, Folha , Abril, Serra e Globo “montam” pesquisa contra Lula e Dilma

Charge: Former president Cardoso, Folha de S. Paulo, Editora Abril, presumptive 2010 presidential candidate Serra and Globo rig a poll damaging to President Lula and presumptive 2010 presidential candidate Dilma Rousseff.

Fonte de Edu Guimarães no jornal Folha de São Paulo informou que está sendo preparada pesquisa forjada mostrando queda da popularidade de Lula e de Dilma por causa da defesa do Sarney. A coisa foi decidida numa reunião na casa de FHC com a participação de Octavio Frias, Civita, Serra e um emissário da Globo.

A source of Eduardo Guimarães inside the Folha de S. Paulo daily said that a phony poll is being prepared to show that the popularity of Lula and Dilma is falling because of their defense of Sarney. The matter was decided at a meeting at Cardoso’s house attended by Folha publisher Octavio Frias, Abril CEO Roberto Civita, Gov. Serra, and an emissary of Globo.

The charge has verisimilitude (read the history of the Proconsult election fraud case by PHA for a historcial precedent), but is it true?

The Welfare Queen Is Alive and Well and Living With Dr. Mengele in Bertioga

Moral panic: Gratuitious argumentum ad Nazium (creative synergies with Buddhist visions of Hell). A Sondhi-powered anti-Thaksin rally, March 2006.

A reader of Luis Nassif notes, regarding media coverage of the Bolsa-Familia income subsidy and a related social program, the ProUni higher education subsidy, here in Brazil:

Reinventaram aquela história dos “bolsa-família” que compraram geladeira ou máquina de lavar.

They have recycled that whole spiel about Bolsa-Familia recipients who bought refrigerators or washing machines.

Ali Kamel, journalism director of the Globo organizations and one of the most intellectually dishonest persons in the Southern Hemisphere, orchestrated a media campaign along those lines last year that was astonishing similar to Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” campaign meme in 1976.

The neocon playbook tends to migrate discretely to South America like Dr. Mengele to Bertioga (the infamous Nazi medical experimenter died in the São Paulo seaside town on February 7, 1979, under the protection of the generalissimos who ran Brazil at the time.)

As denúncias do TCU, via José Jorge ex-vice na chapa psdb/plf, dão conta de irregularidades num programa que levou 400 mil jovens ao ensino universitário. Qual o teor das denúncias: 39 trinta e nove teriam forjado renda e seriam possuidores de carros zeroKM. Um deles, dono de veículo com valor acima de R$ 90 mil reais.Com estes dados, veio a manchete: ProUni dá vagas a donos de carros 0km.

The federal accounting tribunal (TCU), through Minister José Jorge, a former vice presidential candidate on the PSDB/PFL slate, claims there are irregularities in a program that has provided 400,000 young persons with a university education. And what is the substance of his accusations? That 39 supposedly misstated their income and own brand new cars. One of them owns a car worth more than R$90,000. Using this data, you get the headline: ProUni admits the owners of brand new cars.

Argentine Press Freedom Bill Is An Assault On Press Freedom: Globo

“Smile, you’re being manipulated”: commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Globo television network.

O Globo tells an out and out lie when it describes as “proceeding through congress in secret” a bill that has been widely debated in Argentine society and about which a Google search turns up thousands of mentions. One cannot even begin to fathom the cynicism of Globo.

O Biscoito Fino e a Massa on “democratization of the media” in neighboring Argentina.

Está ouriçada a grande mídia argentina, e particularmente seu maior grupo, o Clarín. Tramita no Congresso desde o dia 18 de março um projeto enviado pelo governo de Cristina Kirchner, que revisa a legislação imposta em 1980, no auge da pior matança ditatorial da história do país. O projeto de Lei de Serviços de Comunicação Audiovisuais limita o poder midiático que um único grupo pode exercer, reduz de 24 para 10 o número de concessões que um indivíduo poderá receber e elimina as restrições à liberdade de informação em nome da segurança nacional contidas na lei da ditadura. Em qualquer sentido que se olhe, ele promove uma democratização ou, pelo menos, as condições para alguma alteração no quadro monopolista de hoje.

The major news media in Argentina, and especially the country’s largest media group, Clarín, is all aflutter. A bill introduced by the Kirchner administration has been working its way through the congress since March 18 that revises the legislation imposed in 1980, the height of the bloodiest dictatorial violence in the history of the nation. The Audiovisual Communications Services Bill limits the power a single group may exercise, reduces from 24 to 10 the number of concessions an individual may receive, and eliminates restrictions on the freedom of the press in the name of national security contained in the dictatorship-era law. Anyway you look at it, the bill promotes a democratization of the media, or at least provides the conditions for altering the monopolist situation that prevails.

Foi o suficiente para que O Globo fizesse uma matéria que, sob a manchete “Casal K faz nova investida contra a imprensa”, conseguia ser ao mesmo tempo sexista – a presidenta é Cristina – e factualmente falsa. Não há, ao longo de todo o projeto, uma linha que atente contra a liberdade de expressão ou informação, muito pelo contrário – ele elimina as que havia na lei de 1980. O projeto de Cristina Kirchner limita, sim, a “liberdade” de que um único grupo controle 70% do mercado.

All of which was enough for O Globo to run a story which, under the headline, “Kirchner Couple Attack The Press,” managed to be both sexist — the president is Cristina Kirchner — and factually false.

Ecce Globo, eternal font of nasty, self-serving, quacking nonsense that it is.