787) Um seminario sobre integracao sul-americana, na USP (em tres dias)

INTERNACIONAL: OS DESAFIOS PARA A INTEGRAÇÃO POLÍTICA E ECONÔMICA DA AMÉRICA DO SUL
Fonte: Portal do IEA
De 23 a 25 de outubro, acontece no IEA o seminário internacional "Integração Política e Econômica da América do Sul, com a participação de pesquisadores brasileiros, chilenos e franceses. Serão 34 expositores, divididos em cinco sessões temáticas: "Espaços de Integração", "Energia e Comércio", "Aspectos Jurídicos e Políticos", "Sociedade Civil e Relações Internacionais" e "Perspectivas de Integração" (leia programa abaixo).

O seminário é uma realização do IEA, do Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação sobre a América Latina (Credal) — vinculado ao CNRS e à Universidade de Paris 3 — e da Coordenadoria de Comunicação Social (CCS) da USP. Os coordenadores são: Wanderley Messias da Costa, professor do Departamento de Geografia da FFLCH/USP e coordenador da CCS/USP; Hervé Théry, professor visitante da Cátedra Pierre Monbeig do Departamento de Geografia da FFLCH/USP e pesquisador do Credal; e Christian Girault, diretor de pesquisa do Credal.

O encontro será realizado no Auditório Alberto Carvalho da Silva, sede do IEA, Av. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, Travessa J, 374, Cidade Universitária, São Paulo. Haverá transmissão ao vivo pela internet em www.iea.usp.br/aovivo. As exposições serão feitas em português, espanhol e francês e não haverá serviço de tradução.

Informações: com Cláudia Regina (clauregi@usp.br), telefone 11) 3091-1686 .

PROGRAMA
Dia 23 de outubro, terça-feira
9h-9h45 Abertura: com Hernan Chaimovich (vice-diretor do IEA) e Christophe de Beauvais (representante do CNRS, França)

SESSÃO "ESPAÇOS DE INTEGRAÇÃO"
Moderador: Wanderley Messias da Costa (FFLCH e CCS/USP)
9h45-10h15 Wanderley Messias da Costa (FFLCH e CCS/USP) e Hervé Théry (Credal/CNRS e Cátedra Pierre Monbeig/FFLCH/USP)
10h15-10h45 Raúl González Meyer (Academia de Humanismo Cristão, Chile)
10h45-11h Intervalo
11h-11h30 Paulo Roberto de Almeida (UniCEUB)
11h30-12h Claudio Jedlicki (CNRS, França)
12h-12h30 Debate

SESSÃO "ENERGIA E COMÉRCIO"
Moderador: Paulo Roberto de Almeida (UniCEUB)
14h-14h30 Aude Sztulman e Marta Menéndez (Universidade de Paris-Dauphine, França)
14h30-15h Sébastien Velut (Instituto de Pesquisa para o Desenvolvimento, Chile)
15h15h30 Claudio Egler (UFRJ)
15h30-15h45 Intervalo
16h-16h30 Philippe Barbet (Universidade de Paris 13) e Marta dos Reis Castilho (UFF)
16h30-17h Claudio Lara (Universidade de Artes e Ciências Sociais, Chile)
17h-17h30 Jean-Marc Siroën (Universidade de Paris-Dauphine) e Alexandrine Brami-Celentano (Instituto de Estudos Políticos de Paris)
17h30-18h Debate

Dia 24, quarta-feira

SESSÃO "ASPECTOS JURÍDICOS E POLÍTICOS"
Moderador: Gilberto Dupas (GACint/IRI/USP e IEEI)
9h-9h30 Fernando Dias Menezes de Almeida (Fadusp)
9h30-10h Ricardo Gamboa Valenzuela (Universidade do Chile)
10h-10h30 Deisy Ventura (Unisinos e Cepedisa/USP)
10h30-11h Intervalo
11h-11h30 Guy Mazet (CNRS, França)
11h30-12h Luiz Fernando Martins Castro (Associação dos Advogados de São Paulo)
12h-12h30 Debate

SESSÃO "SOCIEDADE CIVIL E RELAÇÕES INTERNACIONAIS"
Moderadores: Celso Lafer (Fapesp e Fadusp) e Manuel Antonio Garretón (Universidade do Chile)
14h-14h30 Cécile Blatix (Universidade de Paris 13)
14h30-15h Manuel Antonio Garretón (Universidade do Chile)
15h-15h30 Renée Fregosi (Universidade de Paris 3)
15h30-15h45 Intervalo
15h45-16h30 Gilberto Dupas (GACint/IRI/USP e IEEI)
16h30-17h Christian Girault (Credal/CNRS, França)
17h-17h30 Debate

Dia 25, quinta-feira

SESSÃO "PERSPECTIVAS DA INTEGRAÇÃO"
Moderador: Carlos Henrique Cardim (Ipri/Ministério das Relações Exteriores)
14h-14h30 André Roberto Martins (FFLCH/USP) e Hervé Théry (Credal/CNRS e Cátedra Pierre Monbeig/FFLCH/USP) [Síntese]
14h30-15h Eliézer Rizzo de Oliveira (Memorial de América Latina)
15h-15h30 Patrick Séchet (Ministério do Exterior, França) e Miriam Cué (Instituto de Pesquisa para o Desenvolvimento, França)
15h30-15h45 Intervalo
15h45-16h15 Carlos Henrique Cardim (Ipri/Ministério das Relações Exteriores)
16h15-16h45 Edgar Vieira Posada (Pontifícia Universidade Javeriana, Colômbia)
16h45-17h15 Roberto Pizarro (Universidade de Artes e Ciências, Chile)
17h15-17h30 Christian Girault (Cradal/CNRS, França) [Encerramento

786) Relatorio sobre o Desenvolvimento Mundial 2008 do Banco Mundial

RELATÓRIO SOBRE O DESENVOLVIMENTO MUNDIAL
Banco Mundial, 2008 (neste link)

AMÉRICA LATINA: SUBSÍDIOS DOS PAÍSES
RICOS SÃO OBSTÁCULO PARA O DESENVOLVIMENTO AGRÍCOLA
O agronegócio e os biocombustíveis estão transformando o setor

WASHINGTON, DC, 19 de outubro de 2007 – Embora os subsídios dos países da OCDE representem um obstáculo para as exportações agrícolas da América Latina, o setor tem demonstrado grande sucesso no desenvolvimento de agronegócios e biocombustíveis, segundo o Relatório sobre o Desenvolvimento Mundial 2008 “Agricultura para o Desenvolvimento”, lançado hoje. Além disso, na última década a agricultura para o desenvolvimento teve pouco impacto na redução da pobreza na região.
Embora a agricultura represente uma pequena parcela do crescimento econômico da América Latina e Caribe – 7% entre 1993 e 2005 –, diversos subsetores com grandes vantagens comparativas tiveram crescimento espetacular – por exemplo, soja nos países do Cone Sul, biocombustíveis no Brasil, frutas e salmão no Chile, verduras na Guatemala e Peru, flores na Colômbia e Equador e bananas no Equador – e os serviços de agronegócios e alimentos têm grande representação nos PIBs nacionais.
Exportações tradicionais permanecem relevantes e respondem por 80% das exportações agrícolas da região, oferecendo novos mercados à medida que se livram crescentemente da dependência das commodities para ajustar-se a demandas de consumo diferenciadas, como por exemplo, café orgânico e Comércio Justo.
Exportações de alto valor têm se expandido rapidamente, com pequenos proprietários entrando em nichos de mercado, tais como a produção especializada de verduras e orgânicos na América Central.
A agricultura na América Latina e Caribe emprega 30% da população produtiva e gera 7% do crescimento do PIB.

Igualando as condições de competição
“Houve importantes resultados obtidos pelas reformas no comércio agrícola”, declarou Pamela Cox, Vice-Presidente do Banco Mundial para a América Latina e o Caribe. “Contudo, esses resultados são distribuídos de forma desigual entre as diversas commodities e países. É urgente que a Rodada de Doha de negociações comerciais leve à remoção das políticas mais distorcivas que prejudicam os países pobres”. Igualar as condições de competição no comércio agrícola internacional na América Latina e Caribe, diz Pamela Cox, é crítico pois a proteção e os subsídios permanecem em patamares muito altos nos países desenvolvidos.
Houve relativamente pouco progresso na reforma das políticas agrícolas dos países desenvolvidos. A proteção e os subsídios aos produtores nos países da OCDE diminuiu de 37% do valor bruto da renda agrícola em 1986 a 1988 para 30% em 2003 a 2005. Embora essa diminuição de 7 pontos percentuais seja um progresso, o volume do apoio cresceu de US$242 bilhões por ano para US$273 bilhões no mesmo período.
Os países latino americanos, como o Brasil, teriam os maiores ganhos em crescimento estimado de produção em uma potencial liberalização agrícola.

Pesquisa e desenvolvimento trazem retornos aos investimentos
Os retornos aos investimentos em pesquisa e desenvolvimento em agricultura são altos na América Latina e Caribe. Os altos ganhos frente ao custo de capital também sugerem que a pesquisa agrícola está em grande parte sub-financiada, segundo o novo relatório. Os países latino americanos e do caribe investiram mais em pesquisa e desenvolvimento agrícola do que todas as outras regiões excetuada a Ásia e os países da OCDE. O Brasil aumentou rapidamente os investimentos em pesquisa e desenvolvimento nas ultimas duas décadas e desenvolveu conhecimento de ponta no setor.

Biocombustíveis: Promessas e riscos para a América Latina e Caribe
Com os preços do petróleo próximos de seu recorde histórico e com poucos combustíveis alternativos para o transporte, o Brasil Peru e outros países da região estão apoiando ativamente a produção de biocombustíveis agrícolas líquidos – normalmente milho ou cana de açúcar para o etanol, e diversas oleaginosas para o biodiesel. Possíveis benefícios ambientais e sociais, inclusive a redução das mudanças climáticas, e a contribuição à segurança energética, são mencionados como as principais razões para o apoio do setor público à indústria de biocombustíveis, em rápido crescimento.
No debate mais amplo sobre os efeitos econômicos, ambientais e sociais dos biocombustíveis, será necessário avaliá-los cuidadosamente – segundo o relatório – antes de estender apoio público a programas de biocombustíveis em grande escala. Estratégias nacionais de biocombustíveis precisam estar fundamentadas sobre uma análise sólida dessas oportunidades e custos.

A agenda latino americana
“Somos responsáveis por tornar a agricultura mais compatível com o meio ambiente e fazer com que exista uma alocação mais eficiente de despesas na região”, disse Laura Tuck, Diretora do banco Mundial para Desenvolvimento Sustentável. “O desmatamento está intimamente ligado à agricultura na América Latina e Caribe. Já vimos os efeitos disso em outras regiões, como a Ásia, e em países como a China, e há possíveis lições para a América Latina”.
O relatório aponta que, em média, 54% dos subsídios vão para o setor privado. Assim, um movimento em direção ao investimento público em agricultura, ou uma abordagem equilibrada, é necessária nos países da América Latina e Caribe. Além disso, os países da região gastam aproximadamente 4% do PIB ao passo que na China esse número é de 8%, o que sugere que a região pode e deve usar melhor seus recursos para a agricultura.
O consumo doméstico é a maior fonte de demanda para a agricultura, absorvendo três quartos da produção e com 60% das vendas domésticas realizadas pelas redes de supermercados. Uma transformação da agricultura tradicional, de baixa produtividade, para uma agricultura moderna e comercial seria necessária para criar crescimento e empregos. Aumentar a competitividade dos pequenos proprietários de terras nos dinâmicos mercados domésticos de alimentos requer abordar especialmente as profundas desigualdades em acesso a mercados, serviços públicos e instituições de apoio.
Segundo o relatório, a maior parte dos paises da América Latina e Caribe são considerados urbanizados, contudo a América Central e o Paraguai se caracterizam como agrícolas. O México tem estados com características agrícolas, e o Brasil tem o atributo único na região de estados que são tanto urbanos quanto altamente dependentes em agricultura para o seu crescimento.
Nas regiões urbanizadas, a agricultura contribui com apenas 5% ao crescimento do PIB em média. Contudo, as áreas rurais ainda abrigam 45% dos pobres, e o agronegócio e serviços alimentícios respondem por até um terço do PIB. A meta geral seria fazer a conexão entre os pequenos proprietários e os modernos mercados de alimentos e oferecer empregos remunerados nas áreas rurais.
“As economias em transformação rápida devem ir além da revolução verde e enfocar a nova agricultura de alto valor – com a renda urbana em crescimento acelerado e demanda por produtos de alto valor na cidades se tornando o impulso do crescimento agrícola e da redução da pobreza”, disse Alain de Janvry, co-autor do relatório.

Mudança climática e agricultura
As mudanças climáticas terão grandes conseqüência na agricultura que afetarão os pobres de maneira desproporcional, diz o relatório. Um número maior de perdas agrícolas e pecuárias já impõe prejuízos econômicos e reduz a segurança alimentar. O custo de modificar a esquemas de irrigação, especialmente os que dependem do degelo glacial no Andes, poderia custar milhões ou mesmo bilhões de dólares.
O apoio do Banco Mundial à agricultura e desenvolvimento rural no ano fiscal 2007 chega a $1,8 bilhão, com um total de 42 projetos na região.
###

O relatório e os materiais relacionados estarão disponíveis na imediatamente
após o embargo na seguinte página:: http://www.worldbank.org/wdr2008

785) Rui Barbosa na Conferencia da Haia, 1907: exposição no RJ

Rui e os segredos de Haia: Centenário da II Conferência Internacional de Haia
Exposição na Casa Rui Barbosa, RJ

A mostra é uma realização da Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa.
Ficará aberta até 16 de dezembro deste ano:
de terça a sexta-feira, de 12 às 18h, e nos sábados e domingos, de 14 às 18h.
Local: Rua São Clemente, 134, Botafogo, Rio.

Para dar ao leitor uma idéia mais completa da importância da II Conferência da Paz de Haia, apresentamos a seguir o texto sobre o assunto Leon Frejda Szklarowsky, jurista residente em Brasília, que o publicou na “Revista Jurídica Consulex, 258, de 15 de outubro:

“A paz não pode ser mantida à força. Somente pode ser atingida pelo entendimento” (Albert Einstein)

Pode-se não gostar da História, mas o ser humano não pode ignorá-la. A História retrata os momentos importantes, desastrosos ou heróicos da existência do homem. É a medida exata do que acontece e deve ser transcrito e rememorado para sempre.
Comemora-se neste ano o centenário da II Conferência de Paz, realizada em Haia, na Holanda, em 1907, por convocação da Rainha da Holanda e do Czar da Rússia, a fim de evitar (o impossível!) a eclosão de uma guerra de proporções mundiais.
Em 15 de junho, instala-se solenemente a assembléia.
Afonso Pena sucedia a Rodrigues Alves, na presidência da República, marcando seu governo, pela participação do Brasil, nessa Conferência.
O Barão do Rio Branco, ministro do Exterior, indicara Rui Barbosa para representar o Brasil, nesse Conclave.
O Brasil comparecia como expressão anã, ante os poderosos da época, mas a presença de Rui alçou-o ao primeiro plano, portando-se como Davi ante o gigante Golias.
Por sua significativa intervenção na defesa das nações exploradas e da absoluta igualdade jurídica dos Estados Soberanos, qualquer que fosse seu tamanho, recebeu o título de Águia de Haia, saindo o país engrandecido com a atuação deste advogado e notável tribuno.
Naquele ano, coincidentemente, Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, militante pacifista italiano, recebe o prêmio Nobel da Paz.
Num dos inúmeros congressos de que participou, pronunciou as seguintes palavras:
“Quiçá não tarde o dia em que todos os povos, esquecendo os antigos ódios, se unam sob a bandeira da fraternidade universal e, deixando as disputas que os envolve, cultivem as relações pacifistas, estreitando sólidos laços entre si”.
Em 1887, doze anos antes da realização da primeira conferência de paz, em Haia, funda a União Lombarda para a Paz e Arbitragem.
Juntamente, com o pacifista Moneta, o eminente professor francês, Louis Renault, catedrático de Direito Internacional, da Universidade de Paris, também recebeu o prêmio Nobel da Paz, por seus esforços em prol da solução dos conflitos, pacificamente.
Nomeado árbitro da Corte Permanente de Arbitragem, de Haia, foi um dos grandes nomes deste Pretório e emprestou sua inteligência e talento em favor da arbitragem internacional e da paz.
Teve participação exemplar nas conferências de 1899 e 1907, contribuindo decisivamente para o desenvolvimento do Direito Internacional.
O Brasil e outros países, do hemisfério sul, estiveram ausentes, na primeira conferência, realizada, em 1899, por não haverem sido convidados. Os latino-americanos sentiram-se, então, desprezados.
Entretanto, graças à intervenção dos EUA, os países latino-americanos tiveram sua presença garantida, em 1907, como afirmação da Doutrina Monroe de defesa da soberania e integridade dessas repúblicas.
A humanidade sempre se pautou pelas guerras, desde a pré-história. O século XIX europeu caracterizou-se pelas trincheiras e valas bélicas, que semearam, entre seus povos, o ódio e a destruição.
Entretanto, no final desse século, reinava ironicamente relativa paz.
Havia terminado a guerra entre a França e a Alemanha.
Aqui e acolá brotavam pequenas lutas, embora as tensões estivessem sempre presentes, e que desencadeariam a I Grande Guerra Mundial (1914-1918) e, em seguida, a II Guerra Mundial e as guerras regionais permanentes, com ameaças de destruição total do planeta, perdurando até o presente este horrendo e apocalíptico vaticínio.
Paradoxalmente, as grandes descobertas, o progresso das ciências, as ferrovias, a eletricidade (uma das mais importantes invenções, matriz de todas demais), a industrialização, em oposição à decadente agricultura, a economia nascente, a massificação, a migração do campo para as cidades, produziram grandes transformações nas sociedades.
Seria o despertar para um mundo novo, jamais imaginado, não fossem a insensatez e as destruições trazidas pelas guerras.
Despontava, na década de 1870, um novo país que se tornaria, em breve, o mais poderoso da Terra e o sucessor dos grandes impérios de então: os EUA.
Neste panorama, a I Conferência da Paz palmilhava a criação de um foro internacional – corte arbitral – com o objetivo de mediar os conflitos entre os Estados, evitando, destarte, que estes resolvessem as disputas por meio das armas.
Na II conferência cristaliza-se a idéia da criação de uma Corte Internacional de Justiça. A arbitragem surgia, então, como a melhor forma de solução pacífica dos conflitos internacionais.
Desgraçadamente, não foi o que ocorreu. As guerras continuaram modelando o mundo de nossos avós, com requintes cada vez mais sofisticados e perversos, e assim prossegue o homem, sem se preocupar com o futuro daqueles que deverão sucedê-lo.
O Século XX trouxe revolucionárias e novas esperanças de momentos de felicidade que ficaram apenas nas intenções.
Com o fim da guerra fria, a sociedade humana vive, hoje, paradoxalmente, ranços de um fundamentalismo de todas as correntes religiosas se alastrando, desastradamente, por toda a parte, o que é verdadeiramente aterrador.
É tão nefasto quanto o era a discriminação político-ideológica e racial de tempos não tão longínquos.
O que parecia sepultado, para todo o sempre, nas cinzas do passado, recrudesce com mais intensidade, atingindo as raias do absurdo e da insanidade.
Os homens prosseguem se digladiando em nome da fé e os fundamentalistas de todos os credos, religiões e ideologias se dizem donos do Universo, como se a humanidade lhes houvesse outorgado o mandato e este lhes pertencesse.
No patamar em que se encontra a humanidade, somente o congraçamento e a solidariedade poderão afastá-la da tragédia de uma hecatombe, porque o ser humano ainda não aprendeu que, antes da guerra (e jamais esta), devem os homens sentar-se à mesa de conversações.
Nunca depois, quando a destruição terá arrasado a civilização, pouco ou nada restando dela.
Os seres humanos podem perfeitamente viver em paz, se quiserem. Basta a vontade política, única capaz de remover fronteiras, etnias, barreiras religiosas e sólidas e antigas desavenças. Ainda há tempo.
Ainda há pessoas lúcidas. Algumas vociferam. Outras, porém, – a maioria – encontram energia para o diálogo e para a diplomacia da palavra, da vida, e não da morte!
A diplomacia, e não a guerra, deve resolver as crises entre nações e povos. Haverá sempre a fé, a alegria de viver, a esperança.

784) Profusao embaixadorial, se ouso dizer...

Não mais se poderá falar que teremos embaixadores sem posto.
C'est l'embarras du choix:

Poder Executivo - Decreto nº 6.235/2007
Dispõe sobre a criação da Embaixada do Brasil na República do Congo, com sede em Brazzaville.

Poder Executivo - Decreto nº 6.236/2007
Dispõe sobre a criação da Embaixada do Brasil na República Islâmica da Mauritânia, com sede em Nouakchott.

Poder Executivo - Decreto nº 6.237/2007
Dispõe sobre a criação da Embaixada do Brasil na República do Burkina Faso, com sede em Uagadugu.

Poder Executivo - Decreto nº 6.238/2007
Dispõe sobre a criação da Embaixada do Brasil na República do Mali, com sede em Bamako.

783) Vietnams na America do Sul?: é Chavez quem promete...

Chávez ameaça transformar Bolívia em "Vietnã" se Morales for derrubado
da Folha Online, 14/10/2007 - 20h55

O líder venezuelano, Hugo Chávez, ameaçou neste domingo transformar a Bolívia em um novo "Vietnã", se a oposição boliviana derrubar ou assassinar o presidente Evo Morales.

"Se a oligarquia boliviana, Deus não queira, derrubar Evo ou assassiná-lo, saibam vocês, oligarcas da Bolívia, que o governo da Venezuela e os venezuelanos não vão ficar de braços cruzados. Tenham muito cuidado, porque não verão o Vietnã das idéias, não será o Vietnã da Constituinte, será, e Deus não queira, o Vietnã das metralhadoras, o Vietnã da guerra", disse Chávez em tom enérgico.

O anúncio foi feito no programa "Alô, presidente", transmitido neste domingo da cidade cubana de Santa Clara para lembrar os 40 anos da morte do líder guerrilheiro Ernesto Che Guevara.

O presidente venezuelano, aliado de Cuba, Nicarágua e Bolívia, disse que "sabe das conspirações contra Evo Morales e das tentativas do Império (EUA) para derrubar Evo, porque Evo é dos que não se vendem".

Chávez destacou que seu aliado boliviano "não é bruto, é inteligente, tem coragem e valor". Segundo Chávez, a oposição boliviana, "valendo-se de artimanhas e terrorismo", está boicotando a Constituinte, que está por terminar "sem poder aprovar um artigo sequer".

O líder venezuelano revelou que conversou com seu colega do Brasil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, sobre a necessidade de se fazer algo "para evitar que na Bolívia ocorra o que aconteceu na Venezuela em 2002", em referência à tentativa de golpe que o tirou do poder durante 47 horas.

Já menos incisivo, Chávez lembrou que "estamos vendo a profecia de Che: um Vietnã, dois, três Vietnãs na América Latina. Equador, Venezuela, são povos rebelados. O que é a Bolívia hoje se não um Vietnã? Um povo que despertou, um líder à frente que está derrotando as forças do Império e os lacaios oligarcas, que arremetem contra Evo, Venezuela e Cuba".

Neste domingo, durante uma conversa "ao vivo" entre Chávez e o presidente cubano licenciado, Fidel Castro, os dois líderes lembraram que Che Guevara pensou em estabelecer uma guerrilha na Venezuela antes de seguir para a Bolívia, onde foi morto em 1967.

"Che tinha planos para ir à Venezuela, antes de ir à Bolívia", disse Chávez, antes de Castro responder que "depois da Revolução Cubana, na Venezuela estão se criando aceleradamente as condições para uma revolução".

"O mundo está repleto de Vietnãs contra o poder tirânico (os EUA), este Exército sobre o planeta", disse Castro, ao lembrar o sonho de Che de criar "um, dois, três, muitos Vietnãs" na América Latina.

782) Doris Lessing sobre o politicamente correto

Confesso que nunca li nada da Premio Nobel de literatura, a escritora inglesa Doris Lessing, ganhadora em 2007. Deve ter sido por essa mania de ficar sempre lendo material "sério" de ciências humanas ou sociais, ou economia e problemas de relações internacionais. e de deixar a boa literatura para "depois", para "quando tiver tempo", o que obviamente nunca aparece, sendo assim...
Ou melhor, nunca tinha lido nada até hoje. O New York Times publica um artigo antigo dela sobre a "incorreção" do politicamente correto, que ela vê como um dos muitos resultados do comunismo e do modo comunista de pensar. Vou procurar ler um dos seus romances. Agora apreciem sua prosa saborosa...


Op-Ed Contributor
New York Times, October 13, 2007
On Thursday, the novelist Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Moments after the announcement, the literary world embarked on a time-honored post-Nobel tradition: assessing — and sometimes sniffing at — the work of the prizewinner. One of the most pointed criticisms of Ms. Lessing came from Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and literary critic, who told The Associated Press, “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable.” He went on to add that the prize is “pure political correctness.” Interestingly, Ms. Lessing had some strong thoughts about political correctness, thoughts she expressed in this adapted article, which appeared on the Op-Ed page on June 26, 1992.

Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer
By DORIS LESSING
New York Times, Op-Ed page on June 26, 1992

WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.

The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.

The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. “The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation...” Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.

Even five, six years ago, Izvestia, Pravda and a thousand other Communist papers were written in a language that seemed designed to fill up as much space as possible without actually saying anything. Because, of course, it was dangerous to take up positions that might have to be defended. Now all these newspapers have rediscovered the use of language. But the heritage of dead and empty language these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of sociology and psychology.

A young friend of mine from North Yemen saved up every bit of money he could to travel to Britain to study that branch of sociology that teaches how to spread Western expertise to benighted natives. I asked to see his study material and he showed me a thick tome, written so badly and in such ugly, empty jargon it was hard to follow. There were several hundred pages, and the ideas in it could easily have been put in 10 pages.

Yes, I know the obfuscations of academia did not begin with Communism — as Swift, for one, tells us — but the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world.

It is one of the paradoxes of our time that ideas capable of transforming our societies, full of insights about how the human animal actually behaves and thinks, are often presented in unreadable language.

The second point is linked with the first. Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase. All writers are asked this question by interviewers: “Do you think a writer should...?” “Ought writers to...?” The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is. The phrases “Should a writer...?” “Ought writers to...?” have a long history that seems unknown to the people who so casually use them. Another is “commitment,” so much in vogue not long ago. Is so and so a committed writer?

A successor to “commitment” is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.

A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, “The Fifth Child,” which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.

A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course ‘The Fifth Child’ is about AIDS.”

An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.

The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.

The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.

There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

A professor friend describes how when students kept walking out of classes on genetics and boycotting visiting lecturers whose points of view did not coincide with their ideology, he invited them to his study for discussion and for viewing a video of the actual facts. Half a dozen youngsters in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts filed in, sat down, kept silent while he reasoned with them, kept their eyes down while he ran the video and then, as one person, marched out. A demonstration — they might very well have been shocked to hear — which was a mirror of Communist behavior, an acting out, a visual representation of the closed minds of young Communist activists.

Again and again in Britain we see in town councils or in school counselors or headmistresses or headmasters or teachers being hounded by groups and cabals of witch hunters, using the most dirty and often cruel tactics. They claim their victims are racist or in some way reactionary. Again and again an appeal to higher authorities has proved the campaign was unfair.

I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.

781) Depois do indice BigMac do The Economist, o indice iPod...

...e desta vez o Brasil se sagra campeão, mas por uma má razão:

Brasil tem o iPod mais caro do mundo e Hong Kong o mais barato
Folha Online, 04/10/2007

O Brasil continua a ser o lugar mais caro do mundo para se comprar um iPod. Um dos maiores bancos australianos, o Commonwealth Bank, usou a mais recente versão do player de mídia da Apple --o Nano de quatro gigabytes-- como forma de comparar as moedas e o poder aquisitivo em 55 países.

Inspirada pelo índice Big Mac da revista "Economist", a pesquisa determina o preço do aparelho em dólares dos Estados Unidos. Segundo o estudo, os brasileiros são os consumidores que pagam mais caro pelo aparelho, desembolsando US$ 369,61.

Hong Kong oferece o preço mais baixo para o Nano, US$ 148,12, seguido por EUA (US$ 149), Japão (US$ 154,21), Taiwan (US$ 165,82) e Cingapura (US$167,31).

Confira a lista do iPod, baseada em preços de outubro:

1. Brasil - US$ 369,61
2. Bulgária - US$ 318,60
3. Argentina - US$ 317,45
4. Israel - US$ 300,80
5. Peru - US$ 294,08
6. Chile - US$ 294,06
7. Malta - US$ 293,83
8. Egito - US$ 269,10
9. Romênia - US$ 266,60
10. Uruguai - US$ 260,00
11. Turquia - US$ 256,12
12. Hungria - US$ 254,50
13. Azerbaijão - US$ 252,11
14. Sérvia - US$ 249,14
15. Croácia - US$ 245,41
16. Rep. Tcheca - US$ 242,54
17. Eslováquia - US$ 234,13
18. Estônia - US$ 226,67
19. África do Sul - US$ 226,60
20. Finlândia - US$ 225,82
21. França - US$ 225,82
22. Rússia - US$ 220,32
23. Noruega - US$ 220,20
24. Suécia - US$ 215,35
25. Bélgica - US$ 211,62
26. Áustria - US$ 211,62
27. Itália - US$ 211,62
28. Portugal - US$ 211,62
29. Irlanda - US$ 211,62
30. Alemanha - US$ 211,62
31. Holanda - US$ 211,62
32. Dinamarca - US$ 209,26
33. Reino Unido - US$ 201,92
34. México - US$ 201,87
35. Chipre - US$ 201,85
36. Luxemburgo - US$ 201,12
37. Polônia - US$ 200,52
38. Filipinas - US$ 198,39
39. Espanha - US$ 197,42
40. Grécia - US$ 196,51
41. Suíça - US$ 195,43
42. Índia - US$ 183,47
43. Malásia - US$ 181,82
44. Coréia do Sul - US$ 180,60
45. Nova Zelândia - US$ 180,58
46. China - US$ 179,63
47. Paquistão - US$ 179,48
48. Austrália - US$ 175,42
49. Tailândia - US$ 174,89
50. Canadá - US$ 169,68
51. Cingapura - US$ 167,31
52. Taiwan - US$ 165,82
53. Japão - US$ 154,21
54. EUA - US$ 149,00
55. Hong Kong - US$ 148,12

Com informações da agência Reuters

780) E por falar em citação, esta vale para economistas...

John Maurice Clark is widely quoted as saying (or having written):
"An irrational passion for dispassionate rationality will take the joy out of life."
The quote is often abbreviated, with the "will take the joy out of life" being left off and with the first part said to define an economist.

(From Richard McKenzie, message in Economic History Net, October 8, 2007)

779) Foreign Policy em espanhol: citação pessoal

Um amigo avisou-me, em 8/10/2007, que o número corrente da revista Foreign Policy en español traz um artigo do jornalista espanhol Fernando Gualdoni (correspondente do El País), sobre o tema da integraçao das infraestruturas na America do Sul, no qual ele cita um artigo meu e meu site.
Neste link: http://www.fp-es.org/oct_nov_2007/story_23_15.asp

Transcrevo as suas citações:

"El reconocido académico y diplomático brasileño Paulo Roberto de Almeida, en un artículo publicado hace tres años en la Revista Brasileña de Política Internacional, da a entender que, aunque la integración regional fue para el Gobierno de Cardoso una prioridad, ésta quedó más en el plano retórico que práctico."

e

"Para profundizar en la estrategia política de Brasil hacia la integración regional, es especialmente interesante el artículo titulado 'Uma política externa engajada: a diplomacia do governo Lula', escrito por el diplomático Paulo Roberto de Almeida y publicado en la Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, Vol. 47, Nº 1, 2004. También del mismo autor es aconsejable el libro O estudo das relações internacionais do Brasil (LGE Editora, 2006). En la propia página de Internet de Almeida, www.pralmeida.org, hay otros artículos reveladores de la política exterior brasileña."

778) Imigração alemã no Brasil: 160 anos

Espírito Santo comemora 160 anos de imigração alemã
Solenidade teve a presença do cônsul geral da Alemanha no Rio de Janeiro, em sua primeira visita oficial ao Estado.

Alemães e descendentes comemoraram nesta 6a. feira, 05, em Santa Maria, distrito de Marechal Floriano,ES, o Dia da Unidade Alemã e os 160 anos da Imigração Alemã no Estado. A festa teve a presença do cônsul geral da Alemanha no Rio de Janeiro, Hermann Erath, da vice-consulesa do Consulado Geral da Alemanha no Rio de Janeiro, Birgit Densch, do cônsul honorário da Alemanha no Espírito Santo, Joern Duus, do ex-cônsul Helmut Meyerfreund e de autoridades da região.
No seu pronunciamento, o cônsul geral da Alemanha disse que os descendentes de alemães espalhados pelo mundo são os melhores embaixadores da Alemanha. “Quando vejo as crianças com trajes típicos, as danças tradicionais, me sinto orgulhoso pelo meu país, e queria felicitar a todos pelo que fazem para divulgar as tradições alemãs. Vocês são os melhores embaixadores da Alemanha”.
Sobre os 17 anos da Unidade Alemã, Hermann Erath lembrou o chanceler Helmut Kohl, que disse ser esse o presente do século para os alemães. “A Unidade Alemã é símbolo de esperança, de paz e de unidade não somente da Alemanha, mas de toda a Europa”, afirmou.
Esta é a primeira visita do cônsul geral da Alemanha no Rio de Janeiro, Hermann Erath, ao Espírito Santo. Na segunda-feira, acompanhado pelo cônsul honorário Joern Duus, ele se encontra com o governador Paulo Hartung para uma visita de cortesia. Depois, participa de uma reunião com o reitor Manoel Ceciliano Salles de Almeida, da Universidade de Vila Velha (UVV), para discutir um intercâmbio entre a universidade capixaba e universidades alemãs.

IMIGRAÇÃO

Os alemães foram os primeiros imigrantes a chegar ao Espírito Santo, em 1847. A bordo do navio Philomena, o primeiro grupo saiu do porto de Antuérpia, na Bélgica, no dia 20 de outubro de 1846, com destino ao Rio de Janeiro. Do Rio, os 108 imigrantes da região do Hunsrück, na Alemanha, iriam para o Sul do País, onde grupos de imigrantes alemães já haviam se estabelecido.
No entanto, D. Pedro II, imperador do Brasil e grande incentivador da vinda de imigrantes, resolveu enviar o grupo recém-chegado ao Espírito Santo. Como as terras ainda não haviam sido demarcadas, os alemães permaneceram em Vitória durante quase três meses, período em que mais dois navios chegaram à cidade trazendo alemães da região de Hunsrück.
Em março de 1847, com a demarcação das terras pelo governo imperial, um grupo de 167 pessoas subiu o rio Jucu fundando a colônia de Santa Isabel e dando início, assim, à colonização alemã no Espírito Santo. O grupo era formado por 39 famílias – 26 luteranas e 13 católicas – e cada uma recebeu do governo 50 hectares de terra para o cultivo e uma ajuda de custo em forma de empréstimo.

Nota BrasilAlemanha/Neues: A respeito da imigração alemã no Espírito Santo, está sendo lançado o livro "Imigrante, a duras penas", de Ivan Seibel - uma maravilhosa ambientação das dificuldades, lutas e vitórias de uma família alemã que passava muitas privações na região do Hunsrück, na Alemanha, e acabou se estabelecendo no Espírito Santo, Brasil, em 1859.
Faltam-nos, no momento, os contatos do autor, que nos disponibilizou, no início do ano, uma prévia do livro em encadernação ainda espiralada e em CD, praticamente pronto para sua edição definitiva. Dizia na contracapa: "A pesquisa histórica e a narrativa do autor concentram-se em pequeno grupo de pessoas da Europa central, que, cansado do longo sofrimento pela falta de trabalho e suas implicações na sobrevivência decide pela emigração para a América. O sonho logo se transforma em pesadelo ao se verem desembarcados na selva de terras estranhas e de um povo e língua desconhecidas. Jacob, o jovem idealista e sua família, apesar dos pesados tributos que a vida lhes cobra, depois de muito trabalho e com muita garra, consegue vencer os grandes desafios do novo mundo."

"Imigrante, a duras penas", 256 páginas, é, em síntese, um livro com inédita e sugestiva ambientação histórica das vicissitudes vividas na fase pré-emigração às margens do rio Reno e que continuariam palpitantes após desembarque em solo brasileiro. O livro é um romance da vida real da maioria dos imigrantes alemães que deixaram as agruras da fome, desemprego e guerras da Alemanha da época e que, aqui chegados, se confrontaram com desafios imensos, vencidos com pertinácia, disciplina e espírito associativo.
Aguardamos novo contato do autor Ivan Seibel, para a devida atualização das informações sobre seu livro. Por ora, pedidos de informação podem ser encaminhados para contato@brasilalemanha.com.br, para reencaminhamento ao autor.

Fonte: Luciana Coelho
E-mail: lucianac2@hotmail.com

Agência de Notícias Brasil-Alemanha.

777) Are Diplomats Necessary?

Are Diplomats Necessary?
By Brian Urquhart
The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 15 · October 11, 2007

Book review:
Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite
by Carne Ross
Cornell University Press, 243 pp., $25.00

1.
Diplomacy is one of the world's oldest professions, although diplomatic practice as we know it is a relatively recent development. Using ambassadors and envoys, often distinguished personalities of the time (Dante, Machiavelli, Peter Paul Rubens), was an accepted practice throughout recorded history. It was also regarded, in Europe at least, as "a kind of activity morally somewhat suspect and incapable of being brought under any system."[1]

The establishment of the international rules of diplomacy, including the immunity of diplomats,[2] began with the Congresses of Vienna (1815) and Aix-la-Chapelle (1818). The rules were a European creation gradually adopted in the rest of the world. Further international conventions update them from time to time. Diplomats have enjoyed a surprising degree of immunity from criticism for the often violent and disorderly state of international affairs.

The history of diplomacy abounds with double-edged bons mots on the nature of ambassadors and diplomacy: "honorable spy"; "splendide mendax"; "a process of haggling, conducted with an utter disregard of the ordinary standards of morality, but with the most exquisite politeness"; and the sixteenth-century Sir Henry Wotton's famous comment, allegedly in jest, that "an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country."In Independent Diplomat, Carne Ross has little patience with the qualified admiration and curiosity with which ambassadors have traditionally been regarded. He tells the story of the disillusionment and rebirth—also in diplomacy—of a fifteen-year veteran of one of the most internationally respected diplomatic establishments, the British Foreign Service.
HUP/A Secular Age

Many Englishmen, particularly of my generation, have an ingrained distrust, mixed with reluctant admiration, for the British Foreign Office, now the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. We remember the disastrous 1930s, the failure to impose preventive sanctions on Mussolini's Italy when it invaded Abyssinia, or to oppose Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland, and the nonintervention policy in Spain. We recall the lack of response to members of the German General Staff who desperately sought British and French support in deposing Hitler while he was still relatively weak. My lifelong dislike of the word "unrealistic," often used to discredit bold ideas, dates from that time. Perhaps equally unfairly, we criticize the Foreign Office for failing to head off hopelessly misconceived plans like the 1956 Suez expedition or the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Carne Ross's book has a firsthand quality that deserves attention. Many of his criticisms and suggestions are by no means new, but his growing disaffection with diplomacy and diplomats should stimulate serious critical thinking about the conduct of international affairs. On the other hand, his use of generalized stereotypes does not inspire confidence.

To take one small instance, describing a coldhearted, hierarchical desert of diplomats and Secretariat members at the UN headquarters in New York, he writes that "to meet...an Under-Secretary of the UN, you must yourself enjoy an equivalent rank in diplomacy or politics...." I strongly doubt this. During the time of my mentor and predecessor, Ralph Bunche, and in the fourteen years that I was a UN undersecretary-general, we actively encouraged outsiders and junior officials to visit us, not least because they were much more stimulating and informative than most ambassadors or ministers. I know of subsequent under- secretaries who have done the same.

In the same paragraph Ross writes, "Like Versailles' inner sanctum, the Secretary-General's suite lies in the most remote and inaccessible part of the Secretariat building." This is the purest flapdoodle. The UN headquarters building bears no resemblance whatsoever to Versailles. The secretary-general's office is on the thirty-eighth floor of a modern thirty-eight-story structure, and is accessible by no fewer than six elevators that also serve the rest of the building. It is true that the secretary-general's inhumanly busy program makes scheduling appointments very tight, but that is hardly a personal choice of the secretary-general.

Ross's account of the quirks, attitudes, conceits, and habits of British diplomats and the Foreign Office echoes a favorite minor theme of twentieth-century British novelists— the use of diplomatic language to soften disagreeable truths: the "us" and "them" view of the outside world; the pervasive complacency that comes from the sense of "the Office's" wisdom and superior judgment; the ritual significance attached to the drafting of telegrams; the carefully constructed barriers against confronting harsh realities; and the cherished illusion of a rational and essentially orderly world controlled by governments. Certainly diplomatic habit often blocks a forth-right approach to international crises. In times of violence and acute human suffering, diplomatic niceties and hy-pocrisies in the UN Security Council can be enraging and can lead to inexcusable inaction or delay. But in a world organization still based on sovereign nations, what is a better alternative?

Ross's attempt to describe the stereotypical "ambassador" is the ironic climax of his indictment of his former profession:

His demeanour is friendly but grave. His expression says that he is a man to be taken seriously: he has much on his mind. He may frown but he will never grimace. He may raise his voice, but he will never shout. Measure is his mien. In all things, measure.

The quintessential quality of these paladins of their profession is, apparently, "balance," "not going too far," and not transgressing the borders of the state system and approved "facts." The ambassador must be a "realist," skeptical of moral enthusiasm or strong measures; he must also appear to be dedicated, in principle at least, to international law and human rights.

Ross describes his "slow descent from illusion to disillusionment." His final British posting was in 1997 to the British UN delegation in New York and at the end of it, in late 2003, he was lent to the UN team in Kosovo. During the run-up to the 2003 inva-sion of Iraq he earned, he writes, a "Rottweiler-like reputation...as the most effective and aggressive defender of British-American Iraq policy, sanctions and all."

The Security Council negotiations leading up to the US invasion of Iraq were the catalyst for Ross's final disillusionment. He recalls the intensive discussions about the draconian sanctions imposed on Iraq in early 1991. There was a basic inability to agree on the facts of the case. Britain and the United States held continued sanctions to be essential for international security; France and Russia maintained that sanctions were causing unnecessary suffering, particularly shortages of food and medical supplies, to the inhabitants of Iraq. UNICEF had calculated that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of sanctions.

Ross was in the group of mid-level diplomats appointed by the Security Council to work on this problem. With no Iraqi representatives present and no accurate sense of what was going on in Iraq, the group was reduced, in Ross's words, to the "absurd spectacle of each side quoting supposedly impartial UN reports at one another." "There is," he writes, "something very wrong about sitting around a table in New York arguing about how many children are dying in Iraq and whose fault it was." He does not, however, suggest a better method of resolving the conflicting political and humanitarian problems involved in sanctions.

Ross is not reticent about the fact that he was good at his job. He mentions that most ministers did not understand the fiendish complications of sanctions. One British minister, who was trying to sell a British proposal to the Russian foreign secretary, asked Ross for a written brief; Ross responded with twenty pages. "He read it that night and the next day deployed it to devastating effect. [Russian Foreign Minister] Ivanov appeared completely stunned."

Ross increasingly felt that "all of us were failing in our responsibility under the UN charter to maximise security and minimise suffering." "It is," he writes,

far too disconcerting a prospect for governments or the diplomats who represent them to analyse or talk about the world as it really is, one shaped and affected by multitudinous and complex forces, among which governments are but one group of many involved.

Can the UN Security Council, still largely controlled by the original five permanent members, be relied on to deal justly and expeditiously with really critical problems? On Iraq, and on many other questions, mutual trust, especially among the permanent members, tends to evaporate quickly. France and Russia, although they based their case on humanitarian grounds, also had strong economic motives for lifting the Iraq sanctions, and both soon concluded that the Bush administration would never allow that to happen.

In 1998 the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iraq had fulfilled all its obligations relating to nuclear weapons except for two minor issues. The United States and Britain refused to agree to any public statement on this important development. According to Ross, the Americans told the British that, for domestic political reasons, the administration could not agree to any public suggestion that Saddam Hussein was doing what he was supposed to do.

The Russian ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, felt that he had been lied to. Richard Butler, then head of the UN inspectors in Iraq (UNSCOM), had stated in Moscow that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with the UN inspectors, but in New York he had issued a report saying exactly the opposite. In 1998 the US and Britain insisted on yet another Security Council resolution demanding Iraq's full cooperation with UNSCOM. Lavrov asked the British if they regarded the resolution as authorizing the use of force if Iraq did not cooperate. The British replied that they did not, but when the UK and the US, in December 1998, launched Operation Desert Fox, an intensive aerial bombardment of targets in Iraq, the British quoted the resolution in legal justification of the bombing. The Chinese, French, and Russians, not unnaturally, saw such obfuscations as evidence of bad faith.

Carne Ross left the Foreign Service in September 2004. His account of this event is surprisingly meager. David Kelly, a British biological warfare expert who had been advising the British mission in New York, had told a British journalist that there were professional misgivings about Prime Minister Tony Blair's intelligence dossier on Iraq's alleged WMDs—the so-called "dodgy dossier." Confronted with an official investigation, Kelly committed suicide.[3] Ross was "appalled and enraged" by this tragedy. In June 2004, he submitted, from Kosovo, secret testimony to a British commission of inquiry into the use of intelligence on Iraq's WMD[4] :

I wrote down all that I thought about the war.... Once I had written it, I realised at last, after years of agonising, that I could no longer continue to work for the government.

It is puzzling that someone who felt so strongly did not reach this conclusion in March 2003, when the UK enthusiastically joined the US in invading Iraq. Ross sent the transcript of his testimony to the foreign secretary and the head of the Foreign Office; neither replied, and that, it seems, was that.

While working at the UN, Ross had been appalled by the disparity between the diplomatic resources of the rich and powerful countries—with their experienced officials and advisers, information, intelligence, and secure communications—and the hopelessly overstretched and inadequate resources of the poorer ones, particularly those, like Kosovo, which are trying to establish their claims to legitimacy through the UN. He also notes that groups who are ignored, or discriminated against, or cannot get a hearing often resort to violence. (The early treatment of the PLO, and its consequences, is an example of this tendency.) After leaving the British Foreign Service Ross set up a nonprofit advisory group, Independent Diplomat, to remedy this imbalance—"a diplomatic service for those who need it most." The only qualifications for receiving this group's assistance are respect for international law and human rights, and a democratic philosophy.

Ross obtained nongovernmental support for Independent Diplomat, although he was surprised to discover that large foundations, for whom human rights are a guiding principle, are skeptical of diplomats and question whether, driven by realpolitik to take inherently amoral positions on important questions, they do any good at all. Independent Diplomat's initial clients are Somaliland, Kosovo, whose claim to national independence is currently blocked in the Security Council by Russia, and Polisario, the exiled independence movement of Morocco-occupied Western Sahara. Ross's organization provides a much-needed service.

2.
Ross's fundamental complaint about diplomacy and the United Nations, that they are not democratic, is, strictly speaking, true. At a time when democratization has proved far more difficult and unpredictable than even its strongest promoters had foreseen, trying to introduce it at this stage at the international level is not a practical proposition, as Ross acknowledges. The European Parliament is made possible by common political, cultural, and social traditions, and common economic interests. The EU's members consist entirely of democracies. A universal world organization has none of these advantages.

Certainly international organizations, starting with the UN Security Council, should be more representative of the world they are serving. It is also important to keep alive the objective, however distant, of a dem-ocratic world organization in a democratic world. In 1945, Ernest Bevin, the postwar foreign secretary of the United Kingdom—a personality by no means starry-eyed or "unrealistic"— spoke of this in the debate on the UN Charter in the House of Commons. "We need," he said,

a new study for the purpose of creating a world assembly elected directly from the people of the world, as a whole, to whom the Governments who form the United Nations are responsible.... In the meantime, there must be no weakening of the institution which my right hon. Friends built in San Francisco.

A world people's assembly would not, Bevin continued, be a substitute for the UN, "but rather a completion or a development of it."[5] Not surprisingly, as the world split into two mutually hostile, nuclear-armed power blocs, this suggestion was not followed up, although in the intervening years, NGOs and others have kept the idea alive by suggesting various ways in which the UN might become more democratic.

In 1994 the late Erskine Childers and I wrote a short book with the self-explanatory title Renewing the United Nations System.[6] In a chapter entitled "Towards a More Democratic United Nations," we revisited Bevin's idea and sketched out how, eventually, a world people's assembly might be elected, be connected with the United Nations, and what it might do. Many of our other ideas were discussed, and some were even included in later UN reforms. About a democratically elected world assembly, however, the silence was total. Fifty years after World War II, governments seemed to be even less willing to consider the democratizing of international institutions than they were in 1945.

Although it begins with the words "We the peoples of the United Nations," there is no mention of democracy in the UN Charter. The UN is a strictly intergovernmental organization, and a place where national sovereignty—almost an anachronism in many other spheres of human activity—is rigidly protected. This unquestionably limits the scope and spontaneity of the organization. Sensitivity to any erosion of national sovereignty is a fundamental obstacle to reforms that would obviously improve the UN. A genuinely international, standing UN rapid deployment force, for instance, would vastly improve both the speed and the quality of the UN's response to crises, but the idea of this badly needed addition is now kept alive only by nongovernmental groups.[7] It seems likely that the aim of democratizing the UN, until it acquires determined and influential political advocates and worldwide popular support, will also have to survive through the efforts of nongovernmental organizations.

Carne Ross describes the lack of good faith and mutual confidence that often undermines negotiations within the Security Council. When the council works with a common purpose, its authority can be remarkably expeditious and effective, as it was, for example, in reacting to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Much of the time, however, national interests and differences easily outweigh a sense of international responsibility. In 1945 it seemed only logical that the five permanent members of the Security Council, the leaders of the alliance that had just won a long and desperate world war, would find it possible, even obligatory, to work together to secure the peace. In those early days many of us looked forward enthusiastically to the Security Council's first meetings, at which its five permanent members would rise above national differences and show the world a new model of international leadership and responsibility. The vitriolic public disputes that immediately erupted among the five in the Security Council were severely disillusioning. They persisted for over forty years.

Dag Hammarskjöld, who probably gave more thought than anyone to the future development of the United Nations, once spoke of "an opinion independent of partisan interests and dominated by the objectives indicated in the United Nations Charter."[8] A sense of international solidarity has in fact emerged in the UN approach to humanitarian problems such as distributing food and other assistance in disasters and to threats such as global warming (but not, as yet, nuclear proliferation). In debates on controversial political matters, however, that sense of international responsibility is often absent. Pending a true democratization of the world organization, it would be a major step forward for the Security Council and the UN as a whole if more nations were willing to frame their foreign policies with regard to the larger international interest. There are already a number of countries—the Nordic and some European nations, Costa Rica, and Canada among them—that try to conduct foreign policy in this spirit.

Carne Ross complains that, despite the revolutionary changes of the past sixty years, diplomatic machinery and modes of thinking are much the same as they were in the early nineteenth century. The "new politics" needed for a globalizing world and its difficulties does not exist. Ross concludes that diplomacy must give up its elite status and be brought down to earth to participate in the world as it actually is. Diplomatic generalists should give way to experts in trade, WMDs, global warming, and other fields that are beyond the grasp of diplomats. (Governments now usually resolve this difficulty by assigning experts to diplomatic missions when the situation demands, as the British government employed the scientist David Kelly to advise the UK delegation about WMDs in Iraq.)

Ross deplores the obsession of diplomats with secrecy, which, in his view, is mostly a way to preserve the mystique that gives them prestige and protects them from criticism. The argument that publicity will ruin "real diplomacy" is an old one. In the nineteenth century George Canning represented the "new diplomat" who sought public support for foreign policy through parliament and the press. The "old diplomat" Metternich described Canning as a "malevolent meteor hurled by divine providence upon Europe."[9]

Ross also deplores the statecentric, "realist" state of mind of his former colleagues and the resulting amoral and misleading view of a world over which governments are, in fact, steadily losing control. He claims that this way of thinking emphasizes differences by forcing negotiations to be conducted "in terms of nation-states and anachronistic and invented identities," which actually exacerbate conflict. An example was the debate on sanctions on Iraq in which diplomats seemed to have no hope of agreeing. However, the "control list" of items prohibited for export to Iraq was so technically complex that experts had to be called in. To the diplomats' amazement, the experts agreed quite easily on the list of what was potentially risky to export to Iraq.

Powerful embassies and plenipotentiary ambassadors were essential in a time when communication with the home capital could take weeks or months; they are less relevant in our world of instant communications. Ross suggests rather ungraciously that embassies are still needed "to organise ministers' visits and look after distressed travelers who lose their passports." On the other hand, it is hard to imagine how the United Nations would tackle its very wide agenda without the diplomatic missions that, for all the failings that Carne Ross describes, make up a skilled, permanent working group in New York. It was also diplomats who recently achieved a vital agreement with North Korea and, earlier, with Libya's Muammar Qaddafi. Who else could have done it?

In his closing pages Ross's argument unravels in a series of increasingly windy and confused propositions:

...For the ordinary public, the self-serving élitism and fake-omnipotence of the world's diplomats has created a comforting illusion: that they are in control, allowing the rest of us to get on with our lives.... The pact of irresponsibility must end. We must correspondingly take more responsibility for our own international affairs.... Every action, whether buying fruit, employing a cleaner, or choosing where to take your holiday is international, and is, in its way, a form of diplomacy. Everyone is a diplomat.

International business and commerce, according to Ross, have learned "this lesson." ExxonMobil has a large political department, and on his recent visit to the US, Chinese President Hu Jintao spent more time with Microsoft than on Capitol Hill. Ross admits that business and technology can "be as ambiguous in their effects as anything else." Politics will always interfere, as when Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft were all accused by Amnesty International of abetting censorship and repression in China. Those companies responded that they must abide by Chinese law.

"The solution," Ross writes,

is therefore obvious. These [private] forces must be pointed in the right direction if they are to be for the good. Effective foreign policy, whether in promoting labour rights or environmental standards, now requires coalitions of actors—the private sector, civil society and government—acting in concert to be effective. If foreign ministries are to be effective, even relevant, in the future, as propagators of policy and change they must consider how to organise such coalitions, and how to encompass, direct and inform these many different strands and effectors of policy.

How such an "obvious" policy could be successfully carried out by Western countries in China he does not say. A little later he writes:

The practice and process of diplomacy, then, needs to change into something much more diverse and eclectic, such that we perhaps shouldn't give it a collective name —such as diplomacy—at all.

What, I wonder, is the Independent Diplomat organization teaching its clients?

Ross's final pages deal in whirlwind succession with UN reform, NGOs, universal norms of behavior, diplomatic legitimacy, international law, a new "global politics," and global political parties, "elected in some way," which

can claim the fullest legitimacy to speak for people.... Only a global politics can lift us above the zero-sum games of governments shortsightedly arbitrating their "interests" in international forums.

He adds that he is not advocating the immediate establishment of a world parliament, and suggests advisory bodies of elected representatives to advise the General Assembly or the Security Council. Quite how such bodies would be elected and by whom is not clear.

The villain of Ross's polemic reemerges:

the unwarranted and unscrutinized power of unelected officials who deal—often badly—with ever more of our collective business. The only long-term answer is for elected representatives to take their place.

Again, how? And elected by whom? And are these putative elections, which will inevitably become politicized, likely to produce more able and public-spirited diplomats and international officials than a rigorous selection process conducted by responsible, nonpolitical, appointed senior officials? I very much doubt it. The longstanding principle that civil servants, national and international, are not elected by political bodies has decisively proved its importance. In my experience, the best diplomats already have a strong sense of global priorities, although that is not necessarily what their governments pay them for. Members of the UN Secretariat must have such a view. The leadership and independence of the secretary-general and the competence, discipline, and integrity of the Secretariat are vital to the functioning of the UN.

Diplomacy has a long and important history. Recently there was a sigh of relief around the world when the United States, after disastrous experiments with military confrontation, gave some sign that it was willing to return to diplomacy as a main instrument of foreign policy. Diplomacy and diplomats have often aroused suspicion, even ridicule, but they still serve an essential purpose. There is, at present, no obvious alternative.

Notes:
[1] Walter Alison Phillips, of Merton and St. John's colleges, Oxford, in a lively contribution to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edition (1910), Vol. 8, p. 294.
[2] On the need for this most vital of diplomatic rights, Phillips mentions in the Encyclopaedia Britannica "the habit of the Ottoman government of imprisoning in the Seven Towers the ambassador of a power with which it quarrelled," p. 299.
[3] See my article "Hidden Truths," The New York Review, March 25, 2004.
[4] Ross's testimony was published in December 2006 by The Independent, London.
[5] Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Fifth Series, Vol. 416 (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 786.
[6] Published by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation with support from the Ford Foundation, 1994.
[7] For example, A United Nations Emergency Peace Service, published in 2006 with the support of Global Action to Prevent War, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and the World Federalist Movement.
[8] Speech in Copenhagen, SG/812, May 2, 1959.
[9] Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edition, Vol. 8, p. 295.

776) Nuclear Insecurity, Foreign Affairs

Nuclear Insecurity
Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007
Article preview: first 500 of 2,976 words total.

Summary: The Bush administration has adopted a misguided and dangerous nuclear posture. Instead of recycling antiquated doctrines and building a new generation of warheads, the United States should drastically reduce its nuclear arsenal, strengthen the international nonproliferation regime, and move toward the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.
Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky is a particle physicist and Director Emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He worked on the Manhattan Project from 1943 to 1945 and served as a Science Policy Adviser to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Washington's strategic thinking about nuclear weapons has evolved in dangerous and unwise directions. In January 2002, the Bush administration announced a new nuclear posture, which it reiterated in 2006. But instead of doing what it claimed it would do -- adapt American nuclear strategy to the realities of the twenty-first century -- the administration has focused on addressing threats that either no longer exist or never required a nuclear response. Rather than protecting the United States, this posture constitutes a danger to U.S. security.
The risks posed by nuclear weapons today are daunting, but rarely in the same ways that they used to be. As the nuclear club has expanded since the end of the Cold War, so have the dangers posed by the possibility of an inadvertent release of nuclear weapons, a regional nuclear conflict, nuclear proliferation, or the acquisition of nuclear weapons by terrorists. At the same time, the military utility of nuclear weapons for the United States has decreased dramatically. Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, is no longer an adversary, and the United States, now the world's unchallenged conventional military power, can address almost all its military objectives by nonnuclear means. The only valid residual mission of U.S. nuclear weapons today is thus to deter others from using nuclear weapons. Given all this, it does not make sense for the United States to maintain a nuclear weapons stockpile of close to 10,000 warheads -- many of them set on hair-trigger alert -- and to continue to deploy nuclear weapons overseas.
An effective nuclear policy would take into account the limited present-day need for a nuclear arsenal as well as the military and political dangers associated with maintaining a massive stockpile. Building a new generation of warheads, as the Bush administration has proposed, would only compound these risks further.
Nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented, but as former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former Senator Sam Nunn, and the outgoing British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, have recently argued, a shift in U.S. policy could blaze the trail toward their eventual prohibition. Given that the risks posed by nuclear weapons far outweigh their benefits in today's world, the United States should lead a worldwide campaign to de-emphasize their role in international relations.
THAT WAS THEN
During the Cold War, the United States' policy of deterrence was designed to convince the Soviet Union's leaders that the assets they valued most highly, including their population, armed forces, and industrial centers, risked destruction if Moscow launched a major attack on the West. Estimates of the nuclear forces Washington needed to make such a threat credible -- that is, what forces it would need to be able to retaliate after withstanding a nuclear first strike -- differed widely. Some analysts were optimistic and thought a limited arsenal would suffice; others were pessimistic and sought to establish unchallengeable nuclear primacy. These debates, coupled with parochial bureaucratic pressures from the U.S. Air Force, led ...

(end of preview; para ler o resto, só pagando aos capitalistas da Foreign Affairs...)

775) Um novo conceito para a vida...

Do site The Edge, neste link.

LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!
An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm
Dimitar Sasselov, Max Brockman, Seth Lloyd, George Church,
J. Craig Venter, Freeman Dyson

In April, Dennis Overbye, writing in The New York Times "Science Times", broke the story of the discovery by Dimitar Sasselov and his colleagues of five earth-like exo-planets, one of which "might be the first habitable planet outside the solar system".

At the end of June, Craig Venter has announced the results of his lab's work on genome transplantation methods that allows for the transformation of one type of bacteria into another, dictated by the transplanted chromosome. In other words, one species becomes another. In talking to Edge about the research, Venter noted the following:

Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn't matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn't know if it would work or not. Now we do. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It's not a question of 'if', or 'how', but 'when', and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.

In July, in an interesting and provocative essay in New York Review of Books entitled "Our Biotech Future", Freeman Dyson wrote:

The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery o life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.

It's clear from these developments as well as others, that we are at the end of one empirical road and ready for adventures that will lead us into new realms.

This year's Annual Edge Event took place at Eastover Farm in Bethlehem, CT on Monday, August 27th. Invited to address the topic "Life: What a Concept!" were Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, and Seth Lloyd, who focused on their new, and in more than a few cases, startling research, and/or ideas in the biological sciences.

Physicist Freeman Dyson envisions a biotech future which supplants physics and notes that after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. He refers to an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer, a subject explored in his abovementioned essay.

Craig Venter, who decoded the human genome, surprised the world in late June by announcing the results of his lab's work on genome transplantation methods that allows for the transformation of one type of bacteria into another, dictated by the transplanted chromosome. In other words, one species becomes another.

George Church, the pioneer of the Synthetic Biology revolution, thinks of the cell as operating system, and engineers taking the place of traditional biologists in retooling stripped down components of cells (bio-bricks) in much the vein as in the late 70s when electrical engineers were working their way to the first personal computer by assembling circuit boards, hard drives, monitors, etc.

Biologist Robert Shapiro disagrees with scientists who believe that an extreme stroke of luck was needed to get life started in a non-living environment. He favors the idea that life arose through the normal operation of the laws of physics and chemistry. If he is right, then life may be widespread in the cosmos.

Dimitar Sasselov, Planetary Astrophysicist, and Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, has made recent discoveries of exo-planets ("Super-Earths"). He looks at new evidence to explore the question of how chemical systems become living systems.

Quantum engineer Seth Lloyd sees the universe as an information processing system in which simple systems such as atoms and molecules must necessarily give rise complex structures such as life, and life itself must give rise to even greater complexity, such as human beings, societies, and whatever comes next.

A small group of journalists interested in the kind of issues that are explored on Edge were present: Corey Powell, Discover, Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Heidi Ledford, Nature, Greg Huang, New Scientist, Deborah Treisman, New Yorker, Edward Rothstein, New York Times, Andrian Kreye, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Antonio Regalado, Wall Street Journal. Guests included Heather Kowalski, The J. Craig Venter Institute, Ting Wu, The Wu Lab, Harvard Medical School, and the artist Stephanie Rudloe. Attending for Edge: Katinka Matson, Russell Weinberger, Max Brockman, and Karla Taylor.

We are witnessing a point in which the empirical has intersected with the epistemological: everything becomes new, everything is up for grabs. Big questions are being asked, questions that affect the lives of everyone on the planet. And don't even try to talk about religion: the gods are gone.

Following the theme of new technologies=new perceptions, I asked the speakers to take a third culture slant in the proceedings and explore not only the science but the potential for changes in the intellectual landscape as well.

We are pleased to present streaming video clips from each of the talks (Freeman Dyson neste link). During the fall season Edge will publish features on each of the talks with complete texts and discussions.
Craig Venter neste link.

============

Em outra seção deste "número" de The Edge, há um:

RICHARD DAWKINS—FREEMAN DYSON: AN EXCHANGE

As part of this year's Edge Event at Eastover Farm in Bethlehem, CT, I invited three of the participants—Freeman Dyson, George Church, and Craig Venter—to come up a day early, which gave me an opportunity to talk to Dyson about his abovementioned essay in New York Review of Books entitled "Our Biotech Future".

I also sent the link to the essay to Richard Dawkins, and asked if he would would comment on what Dyson termed the end of "the Darwinian interlude".

Early the next morning, prior to the all-day discussion (which also included as participants Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, and Seth Lloyd) Dawkins emailed his thoughts which I read to the group during the discussion following Dyson's talk. [NOTE: Dawkins asked me to make it clear that his email below "was written hastily as a letter to you, and was not designed for publication, or indeed to be read out at a meeting of biologists at your farm!"].

Now Dyson has responded and the exchange is below.

Primeiro, aos argumentos de Richard Dawkins, abaixo.

"By Darwinian evolution he [Woese] means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species."

"With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them."

These two quotations from Dyson constitute a classic schoolboy howler, a catastrophic misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. Darwinian evolution, both as Darwin understood it, and as we understand it today in rather different language, is NOT based on the competition for survival of species. It is based on competition for survival WITHIN species. Darwin would have said competition between individuals within every species. I would say competition between genes within gene pools. The difference between those two ways of putting it is small compared with Dyson's howler (shared by most laymen: it is the howler that I wrote The Selfish Gene partly to dispel, and I thought I had pretty much succeeded, but Dyson obviously hasn't read it!) that natural selection is about the differential survival or extinction of species. Of course the extinction of species is extremely important in the history of life, and there may very well be non-random aspects of it (some species are more likely to go extinct than others) but, although this may in some superficial sense resemble Darwinian selection, it is NOT the selection process that has driven evolution. Moreover, arms races between species constitute an important part of the competitive climate that drives Darwinian evolution. But in, for example, the arms race between predators and prey, or parasites and hosts, the competition that drives evolution is all going on within species. Individual foxes don't compete with rabbits, they compete with other individual foxes within their own species to be the ones that catch the rabbits (I would prefer to rephrase it as competition between genes within the fox gene pool).

The rest of Dyson's piece is interesting, as you'd expect, and there really is an interesting sense in which there is an interlude between two periods of horizontal transfer (and we mustn't forget that bacteria still practise horizontal transfer and have done throughout the time when eucaryotes have been in the 'Interlude'). But the interlude in the middle is not the Darwinian Interlude, it is the Meiosis / Sex / Gene-Pool / Species Interlude. Darwinian selection between genes still goes on during eras of horizontal transfer, just as it does during the Interlude. What happened during the 3-billion-year Interlude is that genes were confined to gene pools and limited to competing with other genes within the same species. Previously (and still in bacteria) they were free to compete with other genes more widely (there was no such thing as a species outside the 'Interlude'). If a new period of horizontal transfer is indeed now dawning through technology, genes may become free to compete with other genes more widely yet again.

As I said, there are fascinating ideas in Freeman Dyson's piece. But it is a huge pity it is marred by such an elementary mistake at the heart of it.

Richard

---------------

Agora, a réplica de Freeman Dyson, abaixo.

Dear Richard Dawkins,

Thank you for the E-mail that you sent to John Brockman, saying that I had made a "school-boy howler" when I said that Darwinian evolution was a competition between species rather than between individuals. You also said I obviously had not read The Selfish Gene. In fact I did read your book and disagreed with it for the following reasons.

Here are two replies to your E-mail. The first was a verbal response made immediately when Brockman read your E-mail aloud at a meeting of biologists at his farm. The second was written the following day after thinking more carefully about the question.

First response. What I wrote is not a howler and Dawkins is wrong. Species once established evolve very little, and the big steps in evolution mostly occur at speciation events when new species appear with new adaptations. The reason for this is that the rate of evolution of a population is roughly proportional to the inverse square root of the population size. So big steps are most likely when populations are small, giving rise to the ``punctuated equilibrium'' that is seen in the fossil record. The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.

Second response. It is absurd to think that group selection is less important than individual selection. Consider for example Dodo A and Dodo B, competing for mates and progeny in the dodo population on Mauritius. Dodo A competes much better and
has greater fitness, as measured by individual selection. Dodo A mates more often and has many more grandchildren than Dodo B. A hundred years later, the species is extinct and the fitness of A and B are both reduced to zero. Selection operating at the species level trumps selection at the individual level. Selection at the species level wiped out both A and B because the species neglected to maintain the ability to fly, which was essential to survival when human predators appeared on the island. This situation is not peculiar to dodos. It arises throughout the course of evolution, whenever environmental changes cause species to become extinct.

In my opinion, both these responses are valid, but the second one goes more directly to the issue that divides us. Yours sincerely, Freeman Dyson.

774) Pausa para propaganda: novo iPod Touch

Fantástico:

Apple acaba de lancar o seu novo formato para o iPOD, o iPOD touch. Parece fantastico.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj0UZjrSVLA


Mais informacoes:
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/

773) Free Trade: the FIRST best solution...

Why is trade booming while trade talks are crashing?
Moisés Naim
Foreign Policy, September/October 2007

One of the most perplexing trends of our time is that free-trade negotiations are crashing while free trade itself is booming. For more than a decade, attempts by governments to get a global agreement to lower trade barriers have gone nowhere. These trade talks are routinely described as "acrimonious," "gridlocked," and "stagnant." In contrast, international trade is commonly described as "thriving" or "surging," and almost every year, its growth is lauded as "record breaking." It's no surprise that trade negotiators feel as despondent as international traders are cheerful.

The last time official trade negotiators had reason to celebrate was in 1994, when 125 nations agreed to a significant drop in trade barriers and the creation of a new institution charged with supervising and liberalizing international trade, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Since then, efforts to liberalize global trade through negotiations have stalled. In many countries, free trade agreements are now politically radioactive, with imports routinely blamed for job losses, lower salaries, heightened inequality, and more recently, even poisoned toothpaste and deadly medicines. The domestic politics of trade reforms are inherently skewed against trade deals. While the benefits of freer trade exist as future promises, the costs can be real, tangible, and immediate. And while the benefits of trade liberalization are widely distributed throughout the entire population, the costs are borne by highly concentrated groups. Cutting agricultural tariffs, for example, may benefit society at large by reducing what we pay for the food we eat. But it will immediately reduce the income of farmers, who will therefore have a strong incentive to organize to derail trade deals. The same is true of workers in factories forced to compete against far cheaper imports. These social and political realities go a long way in explaining why enthusiasm for reaching trade agreements has dried up in many countries.

It started in 1999, when the attempt to launch a new round of trade negotiations crashed in Seattle. Those botched meetings are now remembered more for the violent clashes between the police and anti-trade activists than for the fact that negotiators went home without even agreeing to start the negotiations. Ironically, the activists were protesting against a deal that wouldn't have happened anyway. Two years later, the trade ministers met again in Doha, Qatar, and decided to initiate a new round that, they agreed, would be concluded in four years. It was not to be. That deadline--and others--came and went. This past June, after six years of talks, negotiators left the meetings on the Doha Round and denounced each other as uncooperative.

Meanwhile, world trade continued to grow at its usual breakneck pace. In 2006, the volume of global merchandise exports grew 15 percent, while the world economy grew roughly 4 percent. In 2007, the growth in world trade is again expected to outstrip the growth rate of the global economy. This sustained, rapid pace of trade growth has led to a more than fivefold increase in world merchandise exports between 1980 and 2005. An unprecedented number of countries, rich and poor alike, are seeing their overall economic performance boosted by strong export growth.

So, what explains the paradox of gridlocked trade agreements and surging trade flows? The short answer is technology and politics. In the past quarter century, technological innovations--from the Internet to cargo containers--lowered the costs of trading. And, in the same period, an international political environment more tolerant of openness created opportunities to lower barriers to imports and exports. China, India, the former Soviet Union, and many other countries launched major reforms that deepened their integration into the world's economy. In developing countries alone, import tariffs dropped from an average of around 30 percent in the 1980s to less than 10 percent today. Indeed, one of the surprises of the past 20 or so years is how much governments have lowered obstacles to trade--unilaterally. Between 1983 and 2003, 66 percent of tariff reductions in the world took place because governments decided it was in their own interests to lower their import duties, 25 percent as a result of agreements reached in multilateral trade negotiations, and 10 percent through regional trade agreements with neighboring countries.

So, who needs free trade agreements if international trade is doing just fine without them?

We all do. Although trade may be booming, giving up on lowering the substantial trade barriers that still exist--in agriculture, in services, or in manufactured goods traded among poor countries--would be a historic mistake. Even the more pessimistic projections show that the adoption of reforms like those included in the Doha Round would yield substantial economic gains, anywhere from $50 billion to several hundred billion. Moreover, according to the World Bank, by 2015 as many as 32 million people could be lifted out of poverty if the Doha Round were successful.

But it isn't just the money. As the volume of trade continues to grow, the need for clearer and more effective rules becomes more critical. In this century, the quality of what is traded will be as important as the need to lower tariffs was in the last. The recent cases of deadly dog food and toxic toothpaste coming out of China prove as much. No country acting alone stands as good a chance of monitoring and curtailing such lethal goods as does the WTO working in concert with governments across the globe.

Moreover, a rules-based system accepted by a majority of nations can protect smaller countries and companies from the abusive practices of bigger nations or large conglomerates. The rule of law is always better than the law of the jungle, even in resolving trade conflicts.

But perhaps what is most important to keep in mind is that, despite all the misgivings about international trade, the fact remains that countries in which the share of economic activity related to exports is rising grow 1.5 times faster than those with more stagnant exports. And though we know that economic growth alone may not be sufficient to alleviate poverty, we have also learned that without growth, all other efforts will fall short. That argument alone should be enough to make us root for the trade negotiators, and not just the trade.

Moisés Naím is editor in chief of Foreign Policy.

772) Produtividade do trabalhador brasileiro em baixa

Uma situação mais do que preocupante, dramática, na verdade. Significa que estamos perdendo a competitividade interna e externa de nossa economia. Má educação geral da população, e dos trabalhadores em particular, explica esse quadro lamentável.

Produtividade cai e Brasil fica mais longe de desenvolvidos
Assis Moreira
Valor Economico, 03/09/2007

A produtividade por empregado no Brasil caiu abaixo do nível verificado em 1980, na contramão da tendência global. A capacidade de produção do trabalhador brasileiro é três vezes menor do a que a de trabalhadores de economias industrializadas e está ameaçada pela China e outros concorrentes emergentes. Os dados são da Organização Internacional do Trabalho (OIT), em relatório que mostra a crescente diferença entre a produtividade do país e das principais economias.

O nível de vida num país depende também da produtividade, que mede quanto um trabalhador produz por hora. Os lucros das empresas crescem quando os empregados produzem mais por hora do que antes. A renda adicional pode ser repartida entre lucro extra e aumento salarial, alimentando gastos e investimentos, criando mais empregos e expandindo a economia. Para a OIT, a produtividade é mais alta quando a empresa combina melhor capital, trabalho e tecnologia. Falta de investimento na formação e qualificação e em equipamentos e tecnologias provoca subutilização do potencial da mão-de-obra.

No relatório "Principais indicadores do mercado de trabalho" (KILM, em inglês), a entidade mostra que a produtividade aumentou no mundo inteiro nos últimos dez anos, mas as disparidades persistem entre nações industrializadas e os demais países. No caso da América Latina, o ritmo de crescimento da produtividade foi o menor entre 1996-2006, período em que parte da Asia e da Europa do Leste ex-socialista começou a reduzir seu atraso.

No Brasil, a diferença no valor agregado por trabalhador cresceu especialmente em comparação com os Estados Unidos, o campeão global da produtividade, segundo a OIT. A produção por trabalhador foi de US$ 14,7 mil em 2005, abaixo dos US$ 15,1 mil de 1980. É várias vezes menor que os US$ 63,8 mil por empregado nos EUA em 2006 (e era de US$ 41,6 mil em 1980).

Na China, a produtividade dobrou em dez anos. Pulou de US$ 6,3 mil para US$ 12,5 mil por empregado entre 1996 e 2006, a mais forte alta no mundo. A produtividade chinesa era oito vezes menor que a dos industrializados, e agora passou a cinco vezes menos. O Leste da Europa registrou alta de 50%.

A produção brasileira, em comparação com os EUA, sofreu queda ainda maior. O valor agregado por empregado no país era equivalente a 36,5% do atingido pelos americanos em 1980, e caiu para 23,5% em 2005. Na direção oposta, a produtividade da Coréia do Sul pulou de 28% para 68% em relação à dos EUA no período.

No setor industrial, a diferença cresce. A produção por empregado industrial no Brasil representava 19% daquela dos EUA em 1980. Agora, declinou para 5% em 2005. O valor agregado na indústria brasileira foi de US$ 7.142 para US$ 5.966 por empregado entre 1980 e 2005. Já a China aumentou o valor agregado industrial em 7,9%. Com isso, reduziu a diferença com os EUA, e a produtividade passou a ser o equivalente a 12% da americana, e não mais 5%.

A produtividade brasileira só cresceu no setor agrícola, florestas e pesqueiro, ficando em média em 3,6%, mas esse ritmo foi inferior ao da China e de alguns países que subsidiam altamente suas agriculturas, como Noruega e Coréia. Com a alta de 3,6% ao ano, o valor por trabalhador brasileiro no setor aumentou de US$ 2.356, em 1980, para US$ 5.700 em 2005. Em contrapartida, os chineses, ao iniciarem a reforma agrícola, com menor coletivização das terras, registraram alta de 4% por ano de produtividade agrícola, triplicando de US$ 330 para US$ 910 por pessoa entre 1980 e 2006. No comércio, onde é maior o uso de tecnologia da informação e de novos modelos de negócios, a produtividade brasileira por trabalhador declinou no período de US$ 3,945 para US$ 4 1.726.

A carga de trabalho dos americanos foi calculada em 1.804 horas em 2006, bem acima da média dos países desenvolvidos, como França (1.540 horas, ou 300 a menos com a carga de 35 horas semanais), Alemanha (1.436 horas) e Japão (1.784 horas). Em boa parte dos emergentes, a carga de trabalho fica bem acima de 1.800 horas. O dado sobre o Brasil é ainda de 1999, quando era estimada em pouco mais de 1.600 horas por ano.

Quando a OIT mede o valor por hora trabalhada, o Brasil também está lá embaixo. A produtividade por hora trabalhada fica em torno de US$ 7,50, valor quase idêntico ao de 1980. Não há dados sobre a China, mas aí é a Noruega, e não os EUA, que tem a mais alta produtividade, de US$ 38 por hora, seguido pelos americanos, com US$ 35,60. A França é o terceiro país com maior nível de valor agregado por hora, de US$ 35.

Para o diretor-executivo do setor de emprego da OIT, José Maria Salazar, dentro de três anos a China pode superar a produtividade da América Latina, que no momento é um terço maior (US$ 18,9 mil) que a chinesa. Mas o assessor nota que no Brasil e no resto da América Latina, em cada dez empregos, sete são criados no setor informal, sem proteção social e com pouca qualificação.

Para reforçar a tendência do perigo chinês, o relatório mostra que só na América Latina subiu a "'vulnerabilidade do emprego"', com menor redução no número de pobres. Já a China é tomada como exemplo de país com amplo aumento de produtividade, que consegue baixar o número de pessoas vivendo com menos de US$ 2 por dia.

"O incremento de produtividade é enorme na agricultura da China, com grande transformação ao deixar a agricultura coletivizada, mas o maior incremento é na manufatura, graças à taxa de investimento anual muito alta, de cerca de 30%", afirma. "Há muita inovação tecnológica, investimentos fortíssimos na educação e uma reserva de mão-de-obra barata."