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Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;

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Mostrando postagens com marcador The Wall Street journal. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador The Wall Street journal. Mostrar todas as postagens

sábado, 11 de março de 2023

Four Nuclear States Can Ruin Your Whole Strategy - Matthew Kroenig (WSJ)

Four Nuclear States Can Ruin Your Whole Strategy

Washington and its allies face new threats from Russia, Iran, North Korea and China—all at once. 

By Matthew Kroenig

The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2023

In its 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, the Biden administration promised to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons” in U.S. strategy. America’s adversaries have different ideas. In recent days, the rapidly advancing nuclear capabilities of all four of America’s nuclear-capable rivals—Russia, Iran, North Korea and China—have made international news.

Vladimir Putin announced on Feb. 21 that Moscow was suspending its participation in New Start, its last remaining arms-control treaty with the U.S. This means that for the first time since the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty of 1972, there are no negotiated limits on Russia’s nuclear forces.

America hasn’t conducted on-site inspections of Russia’s nuclear arsenal since March 2020 in any case, first because of Covid-19 and then Russian noncooperation during the war in Ukraine. That led the State Department to declare Russia “in noncompliance” with the treaty in January.

It would be prudent to assume Russia may soon expand its strategic nuclear force beyond the 1,550 warheads allowed in the treaty, if it hasn’t done so already. This is in addition to its large stockpile of battlefield and exotic nuclear weapons (such as underwater nuclear-armed drones) that the treaty doesn’t cover.

On Feb. 19, it was reported that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors caught Iran enriching uranium to 84% purity—a hair’s breadth from the 90% needed for a bomb. Outside experts estimate that Iran’s breakout timeline—the time it would take to produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium—is now essentially zero.

Some argue that we have more time because it would take months for Iran to fashion a functioning nuclear warhead, but in reality the game will be over as soon as the Iranians have enough material for a bomb. Like North Korea, Tehran could move the material to secret underground locations and fashion warheads undisturbed.

The Biden administration tried to negotiate limits on Iran’s nuclear program, but talks broke down in the face of Tehran’s brutal crackdown on protesters. President Biden says he is willing to use force as a last resort, but the moment of last resort is now and Mr. Biden isn’t readying military options. The 20-year international effort to keep Iran from the bomb has likely failed.

On Feb. 18, North Korea conducted a test of a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile and demonstrated the ability to reach the continental U.S. Pyongyang is the third American adversary capable of holding the U.S. homeland at risk with the threat of nuclear war.

As the North Korea threat grows, American allies worry about the credibility of our extended deterrence, and some consider building their own nuclear arsenals. In public opinion polls, a majority of South Koreans support building an independent nuclear force.

On Feb. 7, the Pentagon notified Congress that China now has more ICBM launchers than the U.S.

What President John F. Kennedy declared in 1962 is still true: America needs to be “second to none” in nuclear weapons. Falling behind means losing a critical element of deterrence.

Instead of pursuing 1990s-era fantasies about reducing the role of nuclear weapons, Washington needs to understand that, for the first time since the Cold War, it is entering a long-term strategic-arms competition. This time will be even more dangerous because the U.S. now faces multiple nuclear-armed rivals.

America needs to strengthen its strategic forces to provide an adequate deterrent for itself and the more than 30 formal treaty allies that rely on U.S. nuclear weapons for their security.

America won the last Cold War in part because it outcompeted the Soviet Union in strategic forces. Washington should remember that lesson if it doesn’t want to lose this one.

Dr. Kroenig is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a professor of government at Georgetown. He served as a senior policy adviser for nuclear and missile-defense policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2017-21.

segunda-feira, 19 de julho de 2021

Resistance and Repression in Cuba - Mary Anastasia O’Grady (WSJ)

 Segundo antigo dirigente do KGB, a máquina de repressão do comunismo cubano é muito mais eficiente do que jamais o foi o KGB na finada União Soviética. O número de pessoas envolvidas no trabalho de vigilância é muito maior do que tinha a Stasi na RDA. 

Trecho: "The corrupt former president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, is blaming the U.S. trade embargo for the events. That’s either stupid or evil. Cubans want liberty and justice."

Paulo Roberto de Almeida


Resistance and Repression in Cuba

Protesters knew they would meet brutality. They went out anyway, demanding liberty.

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2021 7:12 pm ET

During a visit to Moscow in 1991, members of the Cuban-American National Foundation had a quiet meeting with a top KGB official. Diego Suarez, who was at that meeting, told me last week by phone from Miami that, in the KGB man’s opinion, Havana’s internal-security apparatus was more sophisticated than the Kremlin’s.

A former senior U.S. official told me on Wednesday that when he and others met with the same KGB general— Oleg Kalugin —in Washington in 2001, he told them that the machine controlling the Cuban police state was more “effective” than the Soviet system had been.

This testimony is worth contemplating in the wake of unprecedented antigovernment demonstrations across Cuba last week. The island’s rich ruling elite have spent decades cultivating a monstrous, merciless state-security structure for occasions such as this. Now it has unleashed a wave of terror on the island that would make Stalin blush.

Watching the Interior Ministry and the military do their dirty work, it’s hard to believe regime collapse is imminent. Yet last week’s protests overwhelmed a network that is supposed to be airtight. The breadth of the uprising reveals a nation at the breaking point. Any lingering pretense of regime legitimacy has been shredded—at home and abroad.

On July 11 in the municipality of San Antonio de los Baños, some 22 miles from Havana, a group of pro-democracy activists launched a protest. It was far from the first of its kind. This column has been documenting the work of Cuban dissidents for more than two decades. But on that Sunday something new happened.

Cuba’s internal security is constructed in concentric circles. Closest to home, there is the “committee to defend the revolution,” which has spies in every nook of life and rewards them for ratting out “counter-revolutionaries.” Next there are regime-controlled activists and “rapid response brigades” to meet and punish anyone who ventures outside to protest.

According to Maria Werlau, executive director of Cuba Archives, the ratio of secret police to the population is higher than it was under the Stasi in East Germany. National police, shock troops and elite-trained military squads are another layer of defense.

With Big Brother everywhere, Cubans are taught to tremble before authority and to keep nonconforming thoughts to themselves. Yet in a flash on that day, large numbers of ordinary Cubans made the decision to raise their voices against their oppressors. The outcry spread as if a fuse had been lit. The fear factor failed.

The regime was caught off guard. It shouldn’t have been. The island was simmering with discontent before 2020, but Covid-19 has put regular privation on steroids and exposed the injustice of a system in which the Communist Party enjoys lavish privileges and everyone else grovels for crumbs.

A further unprecedented development: What was happening in San Antonio de los Baños didn’t stay there. Images of Cubans chanting “liberty” and “down with communism” went viral. Within hours, thousands were marching in more than 30 cities. Some reports say that the protests extended to 60 towns and municipalities.

Dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel loaded up buses with trained military hit men and sent them, dressed in civilian clothing and carrying metal bars and sticks, to attack the demonstrators. They chased, beat and dragged citizens in the streets. Uniformed enforcers, some dressed in riot gear, were also used. Some fired weapons. One man was killed.

In the aftermath of the marches there were home-to-home searches for enemies of the revolution. Democracy advocates on the island say some 5,000 people have been arrested and the whereabouts of nearly 200 are unknown. Arrests include important dissident leaders like José Daniel Ferrer and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the journalist Henry Constantin.

Many protesters were young. They knew their demands would be answered with brutality. They went out anyway, out of desperation, hoping that someone in power would hear their pleas.

Some have. The nephew of Gen. Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, who sits atop the military’s tourism conglomerate, uploaded a video last week condemning repression and calling for change. Some intellectuals and artists quit their associations with the regime, including film director Carlos Lechuga, who on Facebook called the president a murderer. Speculation is rampant that family members of the ruling elite are heading out of the country.

The corrupt former president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, is blaming the U.S. trade embargo for the events. That’s either stupid or evil. Cubans want liberty and justice.

More blood will be shed. But the financially and morally bankrupt authorities won’t be able to feed their security apparatus indefinitely.

The six-decade lie that the revolution produced well-being and equity has been laid bare. What Cubans—and the world—have seen cannot be unseen.

https://www.google.com.br/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/resistance-cuba-protests-coronavirus-san-antonio-de-los-banos-diaz-canel-11626638849


sábado, 19 de junho de 2021

O mundo precisa de uma nova Carta do Atlântico? A primeira, em 1941, era contra o nazismo. Agora é contra a China? - Richard J. Evans (The Wall Street Journal)

Essa tal de nova "Carta do Atlântico", do Biden e do Boris Johnson, é pura demagogia, aproveitando a mística da declaração de 1941, que nem tinha esse nome, e que se destinava a salvar a Grã-Bretanha numa das horas mais dramáticas da sua história, depois da Invencível Armada (destruída pelo próprio canal da Mancha) e da ameaça napoleônica (vencida em Trafalgar). Depois dos espanhóis e dos franceses, os chineses, e contra os americanos desta vez? Joe Biden está exagerando no seu populismo histórico, se rendendo ao que as esquerdas chamariam de "complexo industrial-militar": milhões de dólares canalizados pela paranoia irracional dos generais do Pentágono e pela inacreditável demência dos acadêmicos que caíram no conto de vigário de uma fantasmagórica "armadilha de Tucídides'. Pobre Tucídides, não merecia essa...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Do We Need a New Atlantic Charter?

Eighty years after FDR and Churchill pledged to defend democracy, President Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson want to reenergize the special relationship for a very different world.

President Biden at G-7 Summit: “America Is Back at the Table”
President Biden at G-7 Summit: “America Is Back at the Table”
President Biden at G-7 Summit: “America Is Back at the Table”
During a press conference at the conclusion of the summit between leaders of the Group of Seven on Sunday, President Biden discussed working together with allies, global vaccine donations and how the group plans to approach challenges posed by China. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

At a summit meeting in England last week, President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed a “new Atlantic Charter,” pledging their countries to work together on a range of issues, from combating climate change and preparing effectively for future pandemics to the defense of democracy and “the rules-based international order.” The agreement intends to “build on the commitments and aspirations set out eighty years ago” in the original Atlantic Charter, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on August 14, 1941, at their first wartime meeting, held at a U.S. naval base in Newfoundland.

The much-publicized agreement reflects Mr. Johnson’s determination to reorient British foreign policy away from Europe in the wake of Brexit. For Mr. Biden it represents a renewed commitment to America’s traditional allies after four years of tension during the Trump presidency, with its policy of “America First.” As Mr. Johnson said in a statement, “Eighty years ago the U.S. President and British Prime Minister stood together promising a better future. Today we do the same.” But does the new Atlantic Charter really deserve the comparison with the historic original?

In fact, the Atlantic Charter of 1941 was less about remaking the world than about fighting World War II. At the time it was signed, Britain and Germany had been at war for less than two years, and the U.S. hadn’t yet entered the conflict. But the Americans had already begun to help the British, notably through the Lend-Lease Agreement signed the previous March, which provided for the U.S. to supply Britain and its allies with war materials. A major purpose of the Charter was to prepare the American people for their likely future entry into the war by telling them what they would be fighting for. 

In this sense, the Atlantic Charter was more a propaganda statement than a program for action. Its eight clauses, echoed deliberately in the eight clauses of the 2021 Atlantic Charter, affirmed the right of peoples and nations to self-determination, the desirability of lowering trade barriers, the postwar disarmament of the “aggressor nations,” the freedom of the seas, and the necessity of social welfare measures and the alleviation of poverty.

The U.S. and U.K. also said they would not seek territorial gains after the war. Importantly, the defeated nations were to be included in the lowering of trade barriers, a conscious rejection of the punitive economic measures that followed the end of World War I. But the ambitious statement wasn’t signed by the leaders and had no formal legal power. Even the name “Atlantic Charter” wasn’t official; it was invented by the Daily Herald, a left-wing British newspaper, to describe what was formally known as the Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister.

sábado, 27 de fevereiro de 2021

Prevendo o fim do capitalismo: resenha sobre as previsões erradas, de Marx a Keynes - Francesco Boldizzoni

 Infelizmente, o Wall Street Journal só permite ler um pedaço de suas matérias para os não-assinantes, mas o importante é ter o nome do autor e o título do seu livro para procurar na Amazon e ler mais um pouco. Transcrevo o que tem na Amazon como informação sibre o livro, já tendo enviado um Sample para minha consulta, antes de transcrever uma pequena parte do book-review do WSJ:

Francesco Boldizzoni:

Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures since Karl Marx

(Harvard University Press, 2020)


PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

Intellectuals since the Industrial Revolution have been obsessed with whether, when, and why capitalism will collapse. This riveting account of two centuries of failed forecasts of doom reveals the key to capitalism’s durability.

Prophecies about the end of capitalism are as old as capitalism itself. None have come true. Yet, whether out of hope or fear, we keep looking for harbingers of doom. In Foretelling the End of Capitalism, Francesco Boldizzoni gets to the root of the human need to imagine a different and better world and offers a compelling solution to the puzzle of why capitalism has been able to survive so many shocks and setbacks.

Capitalism entered the twenty-first century triumphant, its communist rival consigned to the past. But the Great Recession and worsening inequality have undermined faith in its stability and revived questions about its long-term prospects. Is capitalism on its way out? If so, what might replace it? And if it does endure, how will it cope with future social and environmental crises and the inevitable costs of creative destruction? Boldizzoni shows that these and other questions have stood at the heart of much analysis and speculation from the early socialists and Karl Marx to the Occupy Movement. Capitalism has survived predictions of its demise not, as many think, because of its economic efficiency or any intrinsic virtues of markets but because it is ingrained in the hierarchical and individualistic structure of modern Western societies.

Foretelling the End of Capitalism takes us on a fascinating journey through two centuries of unfulfilled prophecies. An intellectual tour de force and a plea for political action, it will change our understanding of the economic system that determines the fabric of our lives.

REVIEW

Boldly written and brimming with new insights on every page, this is not your grandfather's old and staid intellectual history. Boldizzoni takes us through a fast-paced history of capitalism's failed doomsayers--only to then explain why they clearly underestimated its elongated life expectancy and stubborn durability. A superb intellectual history of how people have (wrongly) predicted and imagined the end of capitalism from the time of Marx until today.--Eli Cook, author of The Pricing of Progress

Foretelling the End of Capitalism is an essential book for anyone interested in intellectual history and political economy. It will play a major role in current debates on capitalism and its future, as well as on crisis and crisis theory.--Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End?

Francesco Boldizzoni shows how predicting the collapse of capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. He illuminates a tradition of economic thinking that has justified do-nothing posturing in the name of revolution, and how it resists learning lessons of its own failures. This book is also a brilliant study of the cult of forecasting.--Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University

This beautifully written book captures the peculiar complicity between hope and disappointment that characterizes prophecies about the end of capitalism over the last three centuries. It will be of great interest to readers, both as a cautionary tale about prophecy and as a model study of the logic of capitalism itself.--Arjun Appadurai, New York University

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Francesco Boldizzoni is Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the author of two books about economic and intellectual history, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic Historyand Means and Ends: The Idea of Capital in the West, 1500-1970.

PRODUCT DETAILS

  • ASIN: B082DK6MBC
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press (May 12, 2020)
  • Publication date: May 12, 2020
  • Language: English
  • File size: 2172 KB

========

Politics: ‘Foretelling the End of Capitalism’ Review

From  Mill to Marx and on to Keynes, a history of misdiagnosis.

The New York Stock Exchange.

PHOTO: ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

‘Prophecies about the end of capitalism . . . have dotted the history of modern social science since its inception,” Francesco Boldizzoni observes in “Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx” (Harvard, 326 pages, $35). “Almost all of the great social theorists, at one point or another in life, engaged in forecasting.” I am inclined to look favorably on any book purporting to expose the follies of revered intellectuals, and the prospect of a history chronicling end-of-capitalism predictions filled me with anticipation.  

Mr. Boldizzoni was of course under no obligation to write the book I was hoping he had written, and he has not done so. He accepts his prognosticators’ premise that capitalism is basically a malign system that exacerbates inequality and “turns culture into business and . . . enslaves minds to its logic.” Moreover his explanations for the failure of predictions by Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes, among others, strike this reviewer as hopelessly abstruse and heavily reliant on the economic theories that lured these intellectuals into making foolish predictions in the first place.

The abrasiveness of the book’s title, together with the author’s highly self-assured tone, led me to expect a bit more in the way of demolition. Mr. Boldizzoni treats his subjects and their “misadventures” with ample deference. He gently concedes, for example, that Marx’s labor theory of value—the theory that a product or service’s value is determined by the labor required to produce it —was wrong. That’s a pretty important thing to be wrong about for a man whose economic theories dominated half the globe for a century, is it not? Mr. Boldizzoni brushes the problem aside, since it “does not disprove the claim that exploitation and the appropriation of surplus value underlie the wage-labor relation.” It doesn’t disprove a lot of things, but it does prove that Marx was a poor judge of economics and human relations.

So reluctant is he to confront the hubris of his subjects’ theories that Mr. Boldizzoni, a professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, actually does precisely what he criticizes them for doing: He predicts the end of capitalism. “Capitalism will indeed end sooner or later,” he writes, without the slightest sense of irony. He can draw this conclusion, he reasons, because “capitalism is a historically bound formation just like the economic and social systems that preceded it in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period.” 

Is it, though? Mr. Boldizzoni, like almost all writers on the left and some on the right, writes of capitalism as a “system,” sometimes even assigning agency to it, as if it were designed by some nefarious force. It’s never clear what he means by the term. What if the thing intellectuals call capitalism is nothing more than the freedom and order necessary to borrow money for the...

(fim da resenha aberta no WSJ)

 


quinta-feira, 23 de julho de 2020

Most recent book by Thomas Sowell: Charter Schools and Their Enemies - Jason L. Riley (WSJ)


Thomas Sowell Has Been Right From the Start
By Jason L. Riley
The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2020


His latest book on charter schools continues his research on minority success in education.

The economist Thomas Sowell’s new book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies, was published last month on his 90th birthday. I hope he’s not done yet, but you could hardly find a more suitable swan song for a publishing career that has now spanned six decades.
Mr. Sowell’s earliest tomes—an economics textbook for college undergraduates and a book on economic history—were directed at students of the dismal science. But his third book, the semi autobiographical “Black Education: Myths and Tragedies,” was published in 1972 and written for the general public. It grew out of a long article on college admissions standards for black students that he wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1970 after leaving his teaching post at Cornell. And it begins with a recounting of his own education— first at segregated schools in North Carolina, where he was born, and later at integrated schools in New York City, where he was raised.
The topic of education is one that he’s returned to repeatedly in his writings over the decades, in books like “Education: Assumptions Versus History” (1986), “Choosing a College” (1989) and “Inside American Education” (1993). In addition, he’s done pioneering research on the history of black education in the U.S. The preface to his latest work describes a conversation he had in the early 1970s with Irving Kristol, the late editor of the Public Interest. When Kristol asked what could be done to create high-quality schools for blacks, Mr. Sowell replied that such schools already existed and had for generations.
Kristol asked Mr. Sowell to write about these schools for the magazine, and a 1974 issue of Public Interest featured a lengthy essay by Mr. Sowell on the history of all-black Dunbar High School in Washington, which had outperformed its local white counterparts and repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests throughout the first half of the 20th century. Over an 85-year span, from 1870 to 1955, the article noted, “most of Dunbar’s graduates went on to college, even though most Americans—white or black—did not.” Two years later, in the same publication, he wrote a second article, on successful black elementary and high schools located throughout the country. Mr. Sowell later told a friend that his work on black education had been “the most emotionally satisfying research I have ever done.”
In a sense today’s public charter schools, which often have predominantly low-income black and Hispanic student bodies, are successors to the high-achieving black schools that Mr. Sowell researched 40 years ago. The first part of “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” describes—in damning detail and with the empirical rigor we’ve come to expect from the author—how successful certain charter schools have been in educating poor minorities. To make sure he’s comparing apples to apples, his sample is limited to charter schools that are located in the same building with a traditional public school serving the same community.
And what’s irrefutably clear is that these charters schools are not simply doing a better job than their traditional counterparts with the same demographic groups. In many cases, inner-city charter-school students are outperforming their peers in the wealthiest and whitest suburban school districts in the country. In New York City, for example, the Success Academy charter schools have effectively closed the academic achievement gap between black and white students.
“The educational success of these charter schools undermines theories of genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in the tests, assertions that racial ‘integration’ is necessary for blacks to reach educational parity and presumptions that income differences are among the ‘root causes’ of educational differences,” Mr. Sowell writes. “This last claim has been used for decades to absolve traditional public schools of any responsibility for educational failures in low-income minority communities.”
The point isn’t that there are no subpar charter schools—there are— but it’s clear to the author that any honest assessment of the data shows that school choice is a boon for groups that have long been poorly served by the system. It’s also clear that successful charter schools are a threat to the current power balance that allows the vested interests of adults who run public education to trump what’s best for students. As Mr. Sowell reminds us, “schools exist for the education of children. Schools do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for teachers college degrees or a captive audience for indoctrinators.”
In recent years, charter-school skeptics have made headway. Limits have been placed on how many can open and where they can be located. And Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, is being pressured by progressives to limit charter growth if elected. All of which makes Mr. Sowell’s new book, in addition to its many other attributes, quite timely.


Amazon presentation: 

About the Author

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of dozens of books and the recipient of various awards, including the National Humanities Medal, presented by the President of the United States in 2003.

A leading conservative intellectual defends charter schools against the teachers' unions, politicians, and liberal educators who threaten to dismantle their success.

The black-white educational achievement gap -- so much discussed for so many years -- has already been closed by black students attending New York City's charter schools. This might be expected to be welcome news. But it has been very unwelcome news in traditional public schools whose students are transferring to charter schools. A backlash against charter schools has been led by teachers unions, politicians and others -- not only in New York but across the country. If those attacks succeed, the biggest losers will be minority youngsters for whom a quality education is their biggest chance for a better life.

  • Hardcover: 288 páginas
  • Editora: Basic Books (30 de junho de 2020)
  • Idioma: English
  • ISBN-10: 1541675134
  • ISBN-13: 978-1541675131
  • Dimensões do produto: 16,2 x 2,5 x 24,1 cm


Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2020
Verified Purchase
First off, you need to get past chapter 2, which may seem tough after seeing the statistics seemingly repeated for several different Charter School networks, but don't get discouraged! There is light at the end of the Chapter 2 tunnel! The level of downright immoral and uncaring behavior of people who seemingly always claim to be so caring about everyone is apalling, and frankly shocking. I can only hope this book reaches many parents who need better schools for their children. If we're lucky it will speak to someone in society whomis truly looking for a way to help kids in failing schools and who has the means to start a Charter School, and has the stomach for it...

It will be interesting to see the negative reviews and refutations of this book over the coming weeks and months which hopefully bring this topic to the national stage.

The author has taken the time and effort to overcome seemingly every objection (valid and frivolous) to charter schools by providing the data to support his assertions, primarily from New York state. He is honest where charter schools aren't the best, but the overwhelming supply of emperical data suggests that Charter Schools are much needed and in greater numbers in most big cities.

His disdain for the Mayor of New York is not lost on the reader, and rightfully so after reading the actions taken by the Mayor to sacrifice the education of New York's youngsters for what seems to be his own ego and that of his "supporters". I just can't understand it myself, but like I said, maybe we'll see some rebuttals, and hopefully they have facts to back them up.

domingo, 21 de junho de 2020

A mentalidade soviética nos EUA, de Pasternak a George Floyd - Izabella Tabarovsky (Wilson Center, WSJ)






The American Soviet Mentality
Collective demonization invades our culture
BY

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, JUNE 15, 2020
The American Soviet Mentality

Russians are fond of quoting Sergei Dovlatov, a dissident Soviet writer who emigrated to the United States in 1979: “We continuously curse Comrade Stalin, and, naturally, with good reason. And yet I want to ask: who wrote four million denunciations?” It wasn’t the fearsome heads of Soviet secret police who did that, he said. It was ordinary people.
Collective demonizations of prominent cultural figures were an integral part of the Soviet culture of denunciation that pervaded every workplace and apartment building. Perhaps the most famous such episode began on Oct. 23, 1958, when the Nobel committee informed Soviet writer Boris Pasternak that he had been selected for the Nobel Prize in literature—and plunged the writer’s life into hell. Ever since Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago had been first published the previous year (in Italy, since the writer could not publish it at home) the Communist Party and the Soviet literary establishment had their knives out for him. To the establishment, the Nobel Prize added insult to grave injury.
Within days, Pasternak was a target of a massive public vilification campaign. The country’s prestigious Literary Newspaper launched the assault with an article titled “Unanimous Condemnation” and an official statement by the Soviet Writers’ Union—a powerful organization whose primary function was to exercise control over its members, including by giving access to exclusive benefits and basic material necessities unavailable to ordinary citizens. The two articles expressed the union’s sense that in view of Pasternak’s hostility and slander of the Soviet people, socialism, world peace, and all progressive and revolutionary movements, he no longer deserved the proud title of Soviet Writer. The union therefore expelled him from its ranks.
A few days later, the paper dedicated an entire page to what it presented as the public outcry over Pasternak’s imputed treachery. Collected under the massive headline “Anger and Indignation: Soviet people condemn the actions of B. Pasternak” were a condemnatory editorial, a denunciation by a group of influential Moscow writers, and outraged letters that the paper claimed to have received from readers.
The campaign against Pasternak went on for months. Having played out in the central press, it moved to local outlets and jumped over into nonmedia institutions, with the writer now castigated at obligatory political meetings at factories, research institutes, universities, and collective farms. None of those who joined the chorus of condemnation, naturally, had read the novel—it would not be formally published in the USSR until 30 years later. But that did not stop them from mouthing the made-up charges leveled against the writer. It was during that campaign that the Soviet catchphrase “ne chital, no osuzhdayu”—“didn’t read, but disapprove”—was born: Pasternak’s accusers had coined it to protect themselves against suspicions of having come in contact with the seditious material. Days after accepting the Nobel Prize, Pasternak was forced to decline it. Yet demonization continued unabated.
Some of the greatest names in Soviet culture became targets of collective condemnations—composers Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev; writers Anna Akhmatova and Iosif Brodsky; and many others. Bouts of hounding could go on for months and years, destroying people’s lives, health and, undoubtedly, ability to create. (The brutal onslaught undermined Pasternak’s health. He died from lung cancer a year and a half later.) But the practice wasn’t reserved for the greats alone. Factories, universities, schools, and research institutes were all suitable venues for collectively raking over the coals a hapless, ideologically ungrounded colleague who, say, failed to show up for the “voluntary-obligatory,” as a Soviet cliché went, Saturday cleanups at a local park, or a scientist who wanted to emigrate. The system also demanded expressions of collective condemnations with regards to various political matters: machinations of imperialism and reactionary forces, Israeli aggression against peaceful Arab states, the anti-Soviet international Zionist conspiracy. It was simply part of life.
Twitter has been used as a platform for exercises in unanimous condemnation for as long as it has existed. Countless careers and lives have been ruined as outraged mobs have descended on people whose social media gaffes or old teenage behavior were held up to public scorn and judged to be deplorable and unforgivable. But it wasn’t until the past couple of weeks that the similarity of our current culture with the Soviet practice of collective hounding presented itself to me with such stark clarity. Perhaps it was the specific professions and the cultural institutions involved—and the specific acts of writers banding together to abuse and cancel their colleagues—that brought that sordid history back.
On June 3, The New York Times published an opinion piece that much of its progressive staff found offensive and dangerous. (The author, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, had called to send in the military to curb the violence and looting that accompanied the nationwide protests against the killing of George Floyd.) The targets of their unanimous condemnation, which was gleefully joined by the Twitter proletariat, which took pleasure in helping the once-august newspaper shred itself to pieces in public, were New York Times’ opinion section editor James Bennet, who had ultimate authority for publishing the piece, though he hadn’t supervised its editing, and op-ed staff editor and writer Bari Weiss (a former Tablet staffer).
Weiss had nothing to do with editing or publishing the piece. On June 4, however, she posted a Twitter thread characterizing the internal turmoil at the Times as a “civil war” between the “(mostly young) wokes” who “call themselves liberals and progressives” and the “(mostly 40+) liberals” who adhere to “the principles of civil libertarianism.” She attributed the behavior of the “wokes” to their “safetyism” worldview, in which “the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.”
It was just one journalist’s opinion, but to Weiss’ colleagues her semi-unflattering description of the split felt like an intolerable attack against the collective. Although Weiss did not name anyone in either the “woke” or the older “liberal” camp, her younger colleagues felt collectively attacked and slandered. They lashed out. Pretty soon, Weiss was trending on Twitter.
As the mob’s fury kicked into high gear, the language of collective outrage grew increasingly strident, even violent. Goldie Taylor, writer and editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, queried in a since-deleted tweet why Weiss “still got her teeth.” With heads rolling at the Times—James Bennet resigned, and deputy editorial page editor James Dao was reassigned to the newsroom—one member of the staff asked for Weiss to be fired for having bad-mouthed “her younger newsroom colleagues” and insulted “all of our foreign correspondents who have actually reported from civil wars.” (It was unclear how she did that, other than having used the phrase “civil war” as a metaphor.)
Mehdi Hasan, a columnist with the Intercept, opined to his 880,000 Twitter followers that it would be strange if Weiss retained her job now that Bennet had been removed. He suggested that her thread had “mocked” her nonwhite colleagues. (It did not.) In a follow-up tweet Hasan went further, suggesting that to defend Weiss would make one a bad anti-racist—a threat based on a deeply manipulated interpretation of Weiss’ post, yet powerful enough to stop his followers from making the mistake.
All of us who came out of the Soviet system bear scars of the practice of unanimous condemnation, whether we ourselves had been targets or participants in it or not. It is partly why Soviet immigrants are often so averse to any expressions of collectivism: We have seen its ugliest expressions in our own lives and our friends’ and families’ lives. It is impossible to read the chastising remarks of Soviet writers, for whom Pasternak had been a friend and a mentor, without a sense of deep shame. Shame over the perfidy and lack of decency on display. Shame at the misrepresentations and perversions of truth. Shame at the virtue signaling and the closing of rank. Shame over the momentary and, we now know, fleeting triumph of mediocrity over talent.
It is also impossible to read them without the nagging question: How would I have behaved in their shoes? Would I, too, have succumbed to the pressure? Would I, too, have betrayed, condemned, cast a stone? I used to feel grateful that we had left the USSR before Soviet life had put me to that test. How strange and devastating to realize that these moral tests are now before us again in America.
In a collectivist culture, one hoped-for result of group condemnations is control—both over the target of abuse and the broader society. When sufficiently broad levels of society realize that the price of nonconformity is being publicly humiliated, expelled from the community of “people of goodwill” (another Soviet cliché) and cut off from sources of income, the powers that be need to work less hard to enforce the rules.
But while the policy in the USSR was by and large set by the authorities, it would be too simplistic to imagine that those below had no choices, and didn’t often join in these rituals gladly, whether to obtain some real or imagined benefit for themselves, or to salve internal psychic wounds, or to take pleasure in the exercise of cruelty toward a person who had been declared to be a legitimate target of the collective.
According to Olga Ivinskaya, who was Pasternak’s lover and companion during those years, the party brass, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, was only partly to blame for the nonpublication of Doctor Zhivago. The literary establishment played an important role as well. Reading over her recollections of the meetings at the Writers’ Union, it is hard not to suspect that some of its members were motivated not so much by fear of reprisals or ideological fervor but by simple conformity and professional jealousy. Some, I imagine, would have only been too happy to put spokes in the wheels of a writer whose novel—banned at home, but published abroad—was being translated into dozens of languages and who had been awarded the world’s most prestigious literary prize.
For the regular people—those outside prestigious cultural institutions—participation in local versions of collective hounding was not without its benefits, either. It could be an opportunity to eliminate a personal enemy or someone who was more successful and, perhaps, occupied a position you craved. You could join in condemning a neighbor at your cramped communal flat, calculating that once she was gone, you could add some precious extra square meters to your living space.
And yet even among this dismal landscape, there were those who refused to join in this ugly rite. A few writers, for example, refused to participate in demonizing Pasternak. And is it karma or just a coincidence that most of these people—many of them dissidents, who were outside the literary establishment—remain beloved among Russian readers today, while the writings of the insiders, ones who betrayed and condemned, have been forgotten?
The mobs that perform the unanimous condemnation rituals of today do not follow orders from above. But that does not diminish their power to exert pressure on those under their influence. Those of us who came out of the collectivist Soviet culture understand these dynamics instinctively. You invoked the “didn’t read, but disapprove” mantra not only to protect yourself from suspicions about your reading choices but also to communicate an eagerness to be part of the kollektiv—no matter what destructive action was next on the kollektiv’s agenda. You preemptively surrendered your personal agency in order to be in unison with the group. And this is understandable in a way: Merging with the crowd feels much better than standing alone.
Those who remember the Soviet system understand the danger of letting the practice of collective denunciation run amok. But you don’t have to imagine an American Stalin in the White House to see where first the toleration, then the normalization, and now the legitimization and rewarding of this ugly practice is taking us.
Americans have discovered the way in which fear of collective disapproval breeds self-censorship and silence, which impoverish public life and creative work. The double life one ends up leading—one where there is a growing gap between one’s public and private selves—eventually begins to feel oppressive. For a significant portion of Soviet intelligentsia (artists, doctors, scientists), the burden of leading this double life played an important role in their deciding to emigrate.
Those who join in the hounding face their own hazards. The more loyalty you pledge to a group that expects you to participate in rituals of collective demonization, the more it will ask of you and the more you, too, will feel controlled. How much of your own autonomy as a thinking, feeling person are you willing to sacrifice to the collective? What inner compromises are you willing to make for the sake of being part of the group? Which personal relationships are you willing to give up?
From my vantage point, this cultural moment in these United States feels incredibly precarious. The practice of collective condemnation feels like an assertion of a culture that ultimately tramples on the individual and creates an oppressive society. Whether that society looks like Soviet Russia, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Castro’s Cuba, or today’s China, or something uniquely 21st-century American, the failure of institutions and individuals to stand up to mob rule is no longer an option we can afford.

Izabella Tabarovsky is a researcher with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center focusing on the politics of historical memory in the former Soviet Union.

domingo, 23 de fevereiro de 2020

A diferença entre Estados autoritários e os democráticos: China como "homem doente da Ásia" no Wall Street Journal

Vinte anos atrás, a prestigiosa revista mais do que secular The Economist tinha uma capa, um editorial e várias matérias sobre a Alemanha, como "o homem doente da Europa", a propósito da relativa estagnação da economia alemã naquela conjuntura.
Qual foi a reação dos dirigentes alemães?
Nenhuma, absolutamente nenhuma.
Ou melhor, reconheceram os problemas do momento e trataram de corrigi-los para que o país retomasse seus antigos níveis de produtividade e competitividade que sempre distinguiram a Alemanha, temporariamente afetados por políticas erradas e pelos impactos reais da integração da RDA, acrescidos dos problemas trazidos pouco antes pela moratória russa, que afetou muitos bancos alemães.
A China já foi chamada de "homem doente da Ásia", no final do século XIX, quando ela realmente estava em decadência e tinha perdido guerras contra a Rússia czarista e o Japão ascendente, assim como estava sendo humilhada pelos imperialismos ocidentais, e não tinha sequer como retaliar.
Logo depois foi a vez do Império Otomano, de ser chamado de "homem doente", o que era também um fato, em breve confirmado pelo fim do Império e o nascimento da Turquia moderna, com um território reduzido em relação ao enorme império antes espalhado pelo sul da Europa, Oriente Médio e norte da África.
Hoje, a China, que não tem nada de "homem doente" da Europa, enfrenta um problema episódico, que vai ser superado dada sua enorme capacidade de reação, sua organização, seu poderio econômico.
O grande historiador e especialista de relações internacionais, Walter Russell Mead, realmente perpetrou um erro grave – ou então a responsabilidade incumbe aos editores –, ao chamar a China de "homem doente da Ásia", mas ele é um colunista baseados nos EUA, que tem liberdade para publicar o que deseja no Wall Street Journal, um jornal conservador, mas provavelmente o melhor jornal do mundo, junto com o Financial Times. A decisão da China de expulsar três jornalistas do escritório de Beijing do WSJ apenas revela o espírito totalitário do PCC, sua intolerância com as opiniões de um acadêmico, que não afetariam em nada a capacidade da China de resolver um grave problema de saúde pública. 
Essa é a diferença entre as democracias e as ditaduras: as primeiras não interferem na liberdade de imprensa e sobretudo na opinião de comentaristas e acadêmicos. Ditaduras costumam controlar seus cidadãos e os próprios jornalistas estrangeiros que escrevem sobre o país. A retaliação inaceitável da China contra jornalistas estrangeiros apenas confirma essa diferença básica, que um dia será superada, para felicidade do próprio povo chinês.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Inside The Wall Street Journal, Tensions Rise Over ‘Sick Man’ China Headline

After China announced the expulsion of three of the paper’s journalists, 53 reporters and editors at The Journal asked top executives to consider changing the headline and apologizing.
John Wisniewski
More than four dozen journalists at The Wall Street Journal challenged their bosses and criticized the newspaper’s opinion side in a letter that was sent to top executives on Thursday, the day after China announced that it would expel three Journal staff members in retaliation for a headline that offended the country’s leaders.
In all, 53 reporters and editors signed the letter. They criticized the newspaper’s response to the fallout from the headline, “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,”that went with a Feb. 3 opinion essay by Walter Russell Mead, a Journal columnist, on economic repercussions of the coronavirus outbreak.
The letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times, urged the newspaper’s leaders “to consider correcting the headline and apologizing to our readers, sources, colleagues and anyone else who was offended by it.”
Describing the headline as “derogatory,” the letter was sent on Thursday from the email account of the China bureau chief, Jonathan Cheng, to William Lewis, the chief executive of Dow Jones and the newspaper’s publisher, and Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp, the Rupert Murdoch-controlled parent company of Dow Jones.
Mr. Cheng, who did not sign the letter, wrote in a separate note that he was passing the letter along to the two executives, adding that he believed their “proper handling of this matter is essential to the future of our presence in China.”
The in-house criticism brought to the surface longstanding tensions at The Journal between the reporters and editors who cover the news and the opinion journalists who work under the longtime editorial page editor, Paul A. Gigot. As at other major newspapers, including The Times and The Washington Post, the news side and the opinion department are run separately.
Mr. Gigot oversees the unsigned editorials that represent the newspaper’s institutional voice, the op-ed columns like the one by Mr. Mead and the criticism in the arts and culture sections. He also hosts a program on Mr. Murdoch’s network, the Fox News Channel.
Foreign news media organizations in China tread a difficult path. The nation’s growing economic and political clout make it an essential story. Chinese officials covet attention from the global stage, and images of foreign reporters jotting down their comments at news conferences are a staple of state-controlled evening news shows.
The Chinese government uses visas for foreign journalists as leverage, doling out and retracting credentials as a way to influence news outlets. Foreign news media organizations face pressure to steer clear of sensitive topics like the wealth and political pull of the families of the country’s leaders.
Like many other international news organizations, The Times among them, The Journal is blocked online in China, and the “Sick Man” headline was brought to wide attention there by state-controlled media, amid nationwide concern over an epidemic that has infected over 76,000 people in China and killed more than 2,400.

China was sometimes described as the “sick man of Asia” at the end of the 1800s, in “the depths of what we now call China’s ‘Century of Humiliation,’” said Stephen R. Platt, a historian of modern China at the University of Massachusetts. The empire had then lost a series of wars and had feared being divvied up by imperial powers.
“Nobody in their right mind would confuse China today with China at the end of the 19th century,” Mr. Platt said. “I think that’s where the insult lies, this hearkening back to this terrible period and somehow implying that it’s all the same.”
On Wednesday, Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a transcript provided by the Chinese government that Chinese officials “demanded that The Wall Street Journal recognize the seriousness of the error, openly and formally apologize, and investigate and punish those responsible, while retaining the need to take further measures against the newspaper.”
The statement added that “the Chinese people do not welcome media that publish racist statements and smear China with malicious attacks.”
The Journal has not made a formal apology. The closest it came was when Mr. Lewis, the publisher, said in a statement on Wednesday that the headline “clearly caused upset and concern amongst the Chinese people, which we regret.”
Susan L. Shirk, the chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, said that there was reason for the newspaper to refrain from making an apology now that the Chinese government had demanded one.
“The Chinese government has been coercive in its demands for apologies from all sorts of international groups on issues that are essentially domestic political issues,” Ms. Shirk, a deputy secretary of state under former President Bill Clinton, said. “This has the effect of interfering in freedom of expression in our own countries.”
A majority of the reporters and editors who signed the letter are based in the newspaper’s China and Hong Kong bureaus.
They included the three journalists whom China ordered to leave the country on Wednesday: Josh Chin, the deputy bureau chief in Beijing and an American citizen; Chao Deng, a reporter, who is also an American; and Philip Wen, a correspondent and Australian citizen who reported on an Australian investigation of a cousin of President Xi Jinping of China as part of an inquiry into organized crime. The Chinese government gave the journalists until Monday to leave the country.
The letter argued that “the public outrage” over the headline in China “was genuine” and said the “Sick Man” headline should be changed online.
“We are deeply concerned that failure to take such action within the next few days will not only inflict further damage on our China bureau’s operations and morale in the short term,” the letter said, “but also cause lasting damage to our brand and ability to sustain our unrivaled coverage of one of the world’s most important stories.”
The letter also noted that people at The Journal had raised concerns about the “Sick Man” headline before China announced that it would revoke the journalists’ visas and order them out of the country. It also questioned whether the headline was “distasteful,” given the coronavirus outbreak.
A Dow Jones spokeswoman confirmed that the executives had received the letter and said in a statement, “We understand the extreme challenges our employees and their families are facing in China.” The company added that it “will continue to push” to have the visas of its three journalists reinstated.
Mr. Cheng, the China bureau chief, and more than a dozen others who signed the letter did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition to criticizing the headline, the letter took issue with an unsigned editorial published by the newspaper on Wednesday, after China’s announcement that the journalists would be expelled.
In the punchy style the editorial page is known for, it got right to the point: “President Xi Jinping says China deserves to be treated as a great power, but on Wednesday his country expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters over a headline. Yes, a headline. Or at least that was the official justification.” The editorial went on to argue that the Chinese government had revoked the reporters’ credentials to divert attention from its “management of the coronavirus scourge.”
The editorial acknowledged criticism of the headline but defended it as echoing a description familiar to American readers that cast the late Ottoman Empire as the “sick old man of Europe.”
Shen Yi, a lecturer on international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, said The Journal’s headline displayed a sense of racial superiority. The language was similar to comments by Kiron Skinner, a former director of policy planning at the State Department, who had said that with China, the United States had “a great power competitor that is not Caucasian,” Mr. Shen wrote in a recent essay.
“The increasing prominence and scope of this sort of language gives you a feeling for the despicable thoughts that underlie it,” Mr. Shen wrote. “Even now, in the 21st century, some U.S. officials and elites still deep in their hearts know and understand the world through the framework of the suzerain and its colonies.”
Mr. Mead, the writer of the op-ed, suggested in a Twitter post on Feb. 8 that he was opposed to the headline, writing, “Argue with the writer about the article content, with the editors about the headlines.” He declined to comment for this article.