Bibliotecas virtuais: uma desaparece, outra permanece (por enquanto)

No que se refere a VirtualBooks, trata-se de uma triste notícia o desaparecimento de uma das maiores, library.nu, mas por enquanto existe uma alternativa, que esperamos permaneça, e que leva à Library Genesis, neste link: http://free-books.us.to/

The disappearing virtuallibrary

Christopher Kelty *

Al-Jazeera, March1, 2012

* Christopher M. Kelty is an Associate Professor of Information Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.

The shutdown of library.nu is creating a virtual showdown between would-be learners and the publishing industry. 

The shutdown of library.nu doesn't bode well for those who wish to learn, but can't afford to pay for textbooks

Los Angeles, CA - Last week a website called "library.nu" disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu (formerly Gigapedia) had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free.  And not just any books - not romance novels or the latest best-sellers - but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities. The texts ranged from so-called "orphan works" (out-of-print, but still copyrighted) to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: guidebooks and scholarly books about the pornography industry. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation. To the publishing industry, this event was a victory in the campaign to bring the unruly internet under some much-needed discipline. To many other people - namely the users of the site - it was met with anger, sadness and fatalism. But who were these sad criminals, these barbarians at the gates ready to bring our information economy to its knees?  They are students and scholars, from every corner of the planet. Pirating to learn "The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn." The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn. This is what our world should be filled with. This is what scholars work hard to create: a world of reading, learning, thinking and scholarship. The users of library.nu were would-be scholars: those in the outer atmosphere of learning who wanted to know, argue, dispute, experiment and write just as those in the universities do. Maybe they were students once, but went on to find jobs and found families. We made them in some cases - we gave them a four-year taste of the life of the mind before sending them on their way with unsupportable loans. In other cases, they made themselves, by hook or by crook. So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? The publishers think it is a great success in the war on piracy; that it will lead to more revenue and more control over who buys what, if not who reads what. The pirates - the people who create and run such sites - think that shutting down library.nu will only lead to a thousand more sites, stronger and better than before. But both are missing the point: the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu - these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university - are legion. They live all over the world, but especially in Latin and South America, in China, in Eastern Europe, in Africa and in India. It's hard to get accurate numbers, but any perusal of the tweets mentioning library.nu or the comments on blog posts about it reveal that the main users of the site are the global middle class. They are not the truly poor, they are not slum-denizens or rural poor - but nonetheless they do not have much money. They are the real 99 per cent (as compared to the Euro-American 1 per cent). They may be scientists or scholars themselves: some work in schools, universities or corporations, others are doubly outside of the elite learned class - jobholders whose desire to learn is and will only ever be an avocation. They are a global market engaged in what we in the elite institutions of the world are otherwise telling them to do all the time: educate yourself; become scholars and thinkers; read and think for yourselves; bring civilisation, development and modernity to your people. Sharing is caring Library.nu was making that learning possible where publishers have not. It made a good show of being a "book review" site - it was called library.nu after all, and not "bookstore.nu". It was not cluttered with advertisements, nor did it "suggest" other books constantly. It gave straight answers to straightforward searches, and provided user reviews of the 400,000 or more books in the database. It was only the fact that library.nu included a link to another site ("sharehosting" sites like ifile.it, megaupload.com, or mediafire.com) containing the complete version of a digital text that brought library.nu into the realm of what passes for crime these days. But the legality of library.nu is also not the issue: trading in scanned, leaked or even properly purchased versions of digital books is thoroughly illegal. This is so much the case that it can't be long before reading a book - making an unauthorised copy in your brain - is also made illegal.  But library.nu shared books; it did not sell them. If it made any money, it was not from the texts themselves, but from advertising revenue. As with Napster in 1999, library.nu was facilitating discovery: the ability to search deeper and deeper into the musical or scholarly tastes fellow humans and to discover their connections that no recommendation algorithm will ever be able to make. In their effort to control this market, publishers alongside the movie and music industry have been effectively criminalising sharing, learning and creating - not stealing. Users of library.nu did not have to upload texts to the site in order to use it, but they were rewarded if they did. There were formal rules (and informal ones, to be sure), concerning how one might "level up" in the library.nu community. The site developed as websites do, adding features here and there, and obviously expanding its infrastructure as necessary. The administrators of the site maintained absolute control over who could participate and who could not - no doubt in order to protect the site from skulking FBI agents and enthusiastic newbies alike. Even a casual observer could have seen that the frequent changes to the site were the effects of the cat-and-mouse game underway as law authorities and publishers sought to understand and eventually seek legal action against this community. In the end, it was only by donating to the site that law authorities discovered the real people behind the site - pirates too have PayPal accounts. Shutting down learning The winter of 2012 has seen a series of assaults on file-sharing sites in the wake of the failed SOPA and PIPA legislation. Mega-upload.com (the brainchild of eccentric master pirate Kim Dotcom - he legally changed his name in 2005) was seized by the US Department of Justice; torrent site btjunkie.com voluntarily closed down for fear of litigation. In the last few days before they closed for good, library.nu winked in and out of existence, finally (and ironically), displayed a page saying "this domain has been revoked by .nu domain" (the island nation of Niue). It prominently displays a link to a book (on Amazon!) called Blue Latitudes, about the voyage of Captain Cook. A story about that other kind of pirate branches off here. So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? One thing it means is that these barbarians - these pirates who are also scholars - are angry. We scholars have long been singing the praises of education, learning, mutual aid and the virtues of getting a good degree. We scholars have been telling the world of desperate learners to do just what they are doing, if not in so many terms.  So there are a lot of angry young middle-class learners in the world this month. Some are existentially angry about the injustice of this system, some are pragmatically angry they must now spend $100 - if they even have that much - on a textbook instead of on themselves or their friends. All of them are angry that what looked to everyone like the new horizon of learning - and the promise of the vaunted new digital economy - has just disappeared behind the dark eclipse of a Munich judge's cease and desist order. Writers and scholars in Europe and the US are complicit in the shutdown. The publishing companies are protecting themselves and their profits, but they do so with the assent, if not the active support, of those who still depend on them. They are protecting us - we scholars - or so they say. These barbarians - these desperate learners - are stealing our property and should be made to pay for it. Profiteering In reality, however, the scholarly publishing industry has entered a phase like the one the pharmaceutical industry entered in the 1990s, when life-saving AIDS medicines were deliberately restricted to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies' patents and profits.  The comparison is perhaps inflammatory; after all, scholarly monographs are life-saving in only the most distant and abstract sense, but the situation is - legally speaking - nearly identical. Library.nu is not unlike those clever - and also illegal - local corporations in India and Africa who created generic versions of AIDS medicines. Why doesn't the publishing industry want these consumers? For one thing, the US and European book-buying libraries have been willing pay the prices necessary to keep the industry happy - and not just happy, in many cases obscenely profitable. Rather than provide our work at cheap enough prices that anyone in the world might purchase, they have taken the opposite route - making the prices higher and higher until only very rich institutions can afford them. Scholarly publishers have made the trade-off between offering a very low price to a very large market or a very high price to a very small market. But here is the rub: books and their scholars are the losers in this trade-off - especially cutting edge research from the best institutions in the world. The publishing industry we have today cannot - or will not - deliver our books to this enormous global market of people who desperately want to read them. Instead, they print a handful of copies - less than 100, often - and sell them to libraries for hundreds of dollars each. When they do offer digital versions, they are so wrapped up in restrictions and encumbrances and licencing terms as to make using them supremely frustrating.  To make matters worse, our university libraries can no longer afford to buy these books and journals; and our few bookstores are no longer willing to carry them. So the result is that most of our best scholarship is being shot into some publisher's black hole where it will never escape. That is, until library.nu and its successors make it available.  What these sites represent most clearly is a viable route towards education and learning for vast numbers of people around the world. The question it raises is: on which side of this battle do European and American scholars want to be? Christopher M Kelty is an Associate Professor of Information Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

Karl May: o maior escritor de minha juventude, junto com Monteiro Lobato

A revista Der Spiegel publica uma matéria a propósito dos cem anos da morte de um dos maiores escritores de aventuras em língua alemã, Karl May, de quem devo ter lido TODOS os livros traduzidos para o Português.
Ele era um ladrão, contumaz, mas escrevia bem...
Pelo menos eu adorava as aventuras de seus herois em terras selvagens.
Seus livros estão disponíveis em Português no link seguinte: http://ebooksgratis.com.br/livros-ebooks-gratis/literatura-estrangeira/romance-karl-may-diversos-livros-para-download/
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

GERMANY'S BEST-LOVED COWBOY 

Der Spiegel, March 30, 2012

The Fantastical World of Cult Novelist Karl May 

Karl May, who died 100 years ago, was an impostor, a liar and a thief -- and one of Germany's most widely read authors. He embellished his own biography with as much fantasy as the scenarios in his adventure novels, and when the deceit was finally exposed, he never recovered. But his legend lives on.

Photo Gallery: The Life of Armchair Adventurer Karl May 

Germany's Best-Loved Cowboy

The Fantastical World of Cult Novelist Karl May

By Jan Fleischhauer

Karl May Jahr 2012

Karl May, who died 100 years ago, was an impostor, a liar and a thief -- and one of Germany's most widely read authors. He embellished his own biography with as much fantasy as the scenarios in his adventure novels, and when the deceit was finally exposed, he never recovered. But his legend lives on.

Only once did he actually visit those wild, faraway countries where he had so fearlessly traveled from the safety of his desk. In April 1899, Karl May took a ship from Genoa to Port Said in Egypt, aiming to finally see the Orient. He had 50,000 marks, a tremendous amount of money at the time, to spend on lodgings for himself and his valet. He was 57, one of Germany's most famous authors and a rich man.

The trip was a disaster. May couldn't tolerate the foreign food, and he was distressed by the stench, the noise and ubiquitous filth. Everything went straight to his stomach and his head. And then there were the tourists combing the sights of Cairo with their Baedeker travel books, "tightly clutching the red guide," as the author grumbled.
But he stuck it out, traveling from Egypt to Ceylon and Sumatra, as if to retroactively walk in the steps of someone he had only pretended to be in the past: an adventurer and globetrotter. When May returned to his native Saxony, after 16 months and two nervous breakdowns, he vowed not to embark on another adventure anytime soon. America, the other land of adventure he portrayed in his books, would have to wait.
Inventing a world is the essence of being a writer. Hardly any other author pursued this discipline as consistently, even in writing about his own alleged experiences. This week marks the 100^th anniversary of Karl May's death. To this day, in Germany at least, the man from the town of Radebeul in Saxony stands alone in the art of creating a make-believe world.
More than 200 million copies of his books have been printed, a dimension otherwise associated with dictators or the founders of religions -- or J. K. Rowling with her Harry Potter series. Half of the Karl May books printed were sold in German-speaking countries. He is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, and only in Eastern Europe did he achieve a comparable degree of fame. The number of fans who remained loyal to him beyond their adolescent years is large, ranging from Albert Einstein to political activist Karl Liebknecht, Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch and writer Martin Walser.
Enduring Heros
One could call also May the forefather of today's environmentalist Green Party. With his critical view of civilization and naïve enthusiasm for nature, he was a romantic revivalist preacher determined to give pacifism a voice or, like some of his Christian contemporaries, a dangerous corrupter of young minds. The East German government felt uneasy about him, banning his works until the 1980s, when May, a native of the eastern German state of Saxony, was rehabilitated, together with Martin Luther and Frederick the Great. German writer Klaus Mann felt that May was an early Nazi, even describing him as "Hitler's literary mentor," but he is relatively isolated in this assessment.
There is no question that May created heroes that entered the collective mythology. There was the Native American Chief Winnetou, of course, or "The Red Gentleman," as he was once referred to in a subtitle in his famous series of novels. Then there was Winnetou's German friend and blood brother Old Shatterhand. But the indestructible German traveler of the Orient, Kara Ben Nemsi, whose popularity surpassed that of all of May's other characters while the author was still alive. Only after May's death did Chief Winnetou become his most beloved fictional character, partly as a result of the popular films with Pierre Brice and Lex Barker that were shown in theaters starting in 1962.
But his works remain adventure literature, driven by the author's desire to dream his way out of the narrow confines of his real life, a unique mixture of genius and triviality. May introduced his readers to people and landscapes they had known only by name, capitalizing on a yearning for distant places that was just as prevalent in the late 19^th century as it is today.
Still, May didn't stop at dreaming. Through his literature, he transformed his own life. For him, writing was initially a way of finding himself, and later a way of rescuing himself. In this sense, he could be seen as an early advocate of the modern age.
From Con Man Best-Selling Author
His ascent was as spectacular as the material that fueled it. A con man with a criminal record, he wrote his way to success and became a best-selling author. May himself couldn't have come up with a more improbable life story than his climb from the penitentiary to the stars. But that would be a novel for others to write. In reality, May, once he had become respectable, was determined to wipe away all traces of his earlier life. But when it did catch up to him, at the height of his success, it was a scandal that would cost him the tranquility of his twilight years and much of his health.
So many aspects of his life had been bent into shape, obtained by fraudulent means and invented. He was a relatively slight man, only 1.66 meters (5'3") tall, whose fists were about as dangerous as a flyswatter. But when he sat on his black horse, his Bärentöter (Old Shatterhand's rifle, the "bear killer,") in hand, he could take anyone on, even the worst villains. May was a pioneer in the art of playing with identities, a talent reflected in the life story of every major artist today.
The German author and literary critic Hans Wollschläger titled his well-known study about Karl May "Grundriss eines gebrochenen Lebens," or "Sketch of a Broken Life." And indeed, May's early years could hardly have been less auspicious for someone who would later become a major international author. Everything about the squalor into which he was born in 1842 is evocative of a brief, oppressed existence. Nine of his 13 siblings died in infancy.
Weaving was a traditional livelihood in the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) town of Ernstthal, where May was born, but the craft was in decline, so that local residents were forced to turn to smuggling and other secondary occupations to make ends meet. If that wasn't enough, people had to eat soup made with weeds and potato peels, the sort of food on which only a "deprived child," as Arno Schmidt, another May enthusiast, described him, could thrive. When his mother received an unexpected inheritance, she used some of the money to pay for midwife training. But her husband had soon spent the rest of the money on his various schemes. Like his son, Heinrich August May was a dreamer.
A Criminal Record
It was clear early on that Karl was talented, and the family pinned its hopes on him. After school, he was forced to spend hours copying text from the encyclopedias, prayer books and stories about nature that his father had gathered from the neighborhood. If young Karl failed to complete his allotted work in time, he could expect a whipping with a birch switch.
The boy was stuffed with facts in a completely unsystematic way, in keeping with his father's confused ideas about education. Looking back on his childhood, May likened it to being "fed and stuffed beyond compare." Nevertheless, a layer of knowledge developed over time that would later prove useful to him.
Prison was his second significant source of education. May was 20 when he stood before a judge for the first time. He had earned a diploma as a teacher's assistant, which promised a meager but steady income. And he did try to earn a living as a teacher, but there was a part of him that refused to accept the limitations of his circumstances.
He seemed to have inherited a certain swagger. When he was a young student, his file described him as "extremely deceitful." May would later describe the dark aspects of his personality that controlled him: "There were all kinds of characters inside me, and they all wanted to be part of my worries, my work, my creativity, my writing and my composing."
What began harmlessly enough soon became more serious. May posed as an eye doctor, "Dr. Heilig," and even wrote prescriptions. According to a police profile, he wore glasses and had a "friendly, suave and mellifluous demeanor." Then he rented a room in the city of Chemnitz as the "seminary teacher Lohse," ordered two muskrat coats from a furrier and disappeared out the back door with his loot.
He was arrested near Leipzig in March 1865, and the verdict was quickly passed down: four years and one month in the workhouse. It was harsh, but not excessive for the time. May had already attracted the attention of the authorities before: a few stolen candles at boarding school and a watch he had neglected to return. They were trifles, but now they were contributing to a picture of a crook and petty criminal who would be better off behind bars.
Serial Novel Success
May was lucky. He ended up in Oberstein Castle near Zwickau, a reform prison that was committed to the idea of rehabilitation, and he was sent to work in the prison library. It was his second stroke of luck. The library contained 4,000 books, including works of fiction with ethical aspirations, as well as historic, scientific and geographic works -- plenty of material for the next few years. May began to fashion a future for himself as a writer. A so-called "C. May Repertoire," now part of his estate, lists 137 titles and sketches for future books. There was something grandiose about all of May's ambitions, a characteristic he shared with Richard Wagner.

He had hardly been released before resuming his lifestyle of deceit and petty crime. In March 1869, he posed as a "police lieutenant" and confiscated alleged counterfeit money from a grocer. In May, he stole billiard balls from a tavern, and in June he stole a horse. When the police arrested him again, he told them his name was Albin Wadenbach, the son of a plantation owner from Martinique.
Some May scholars speculate that the author may have been mentally ill. In a retroactive psychological appraisal performed in 2003, the neurologist and psychiatrist Edgar Bayer concludes that May suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder. The typical symptoms, Bayer wrote, were a "grandiose sense of one's own importance," an excessive "craving of admiration" and "fantasies of limitless success."
May was 32 when he was released from the Waldheim Prison, where the authorities described him as "somewhat exhausted but otherwise fit for work." He was a dropout who had already spent half of his life under supervision, a dependent and "very old child," as May biographer Rüdiger Schaper writes. May insisted that he wanted to emigrate to America, but instead he published the first episode of "Aus der Mappe eines Vielgereisten" ("From the Portfolio of a Well-Traveled Man") in a magazine published by Heinrich Gotthold Münchmeyer, the Deutsches Familienblatt, or German Family Magazine.

Part 2: Blurring Fact and Fiction

Münchmeyer was one of the major players in the business of serial novels, which flourished when printing machines became widespread. Each booklet, which was part of a subscription, consisted of about 20 pages. May proved to be a talented supplier, and he was soon hired as full-time writer. He was tremendously prolific as an author of light fiction, churning out more than 20,000 printed pages in the first five years. Someone who writes trash fiction can't afford to have writer's block. Sometimes May lost track of where he was and characters would simply disappear, or the plot lines became so entangled that he had to abandon some of them.
At first, producing fiction on demand was a "gift from heaven" for May, but he would later perceive it as a curse. He moved on to more reputable publishers. In 1892, the Fehsenfeld publishing company in Freiburg published the first volume of "Carl May's Collected Travel Novels," with the characteristic green spine that still reminds many readers today of nights spent blissfully devouring May's books.
May intuitively understood the public's need for authenticity. At first, he merely hinted that his writing wasn't just made up, but that he was describing his own experiences. When one reader inquired as to the author's whereabouts, he received the following response: "He is currently traveling in Russia and intends to make another side trip to Zululand." A few months later, readers learned that May was "laid low because of an old wound that has opened up again."
But the boundaries between the author and his fictional heroes became more blurred with each new story. At some point, Old Shatterhand and Kara Ben Nemsi were no longer merely written extensions of the author's existence.
May outfitted his house as an exotic treasure chamber, buying the furniture from a dealer in Dresden. At a time when the Orient was in vogue, he had no trouble finding what he wanted. Carpets were hung up on the walls and a stuffed lion stood next to his desk.
Living in a Fantasy World
May had a studio photographer in Linz make portrait photos of him, dressed in an Old Shatterhand costume against exotic backdrops. A rifle maker in Dresden made the Silberbüchse (Silver Gun), the Bärentöter(Bear Killer) and the Henrystutzen (Henry Rifle), the most famous weapons from his books, according to his specifications. They were proudly displayed in his house, the "Villa Shatterhand," which the author bought in 1896 with his now handsome royalties. But the guns could not be used because they probably would have exploded.
The fictitious persona came naturally for an impostor like May. Because he believed that he was the person he pretended to be, he became convincing to others. This distinguished him from a liar, who is always aware of his tricks. As with the charades that led to his imprisonment, May became more audacious over time. Once he had internalized his role as an adventurer, there were no longer any limits to his fantasies.
During a reading in Munich, May told the audience that he had "only two major goals left in life, a mission to the Apaches, where I am a chief," and a trip to "my Halef, the supreme sheikh of the Haddadin Arabs." Then, he said, he would present his Henrystutzen to his majesty, the Kaiser, in the hope that it would become the standard weapon in the German army. When May was invited to an audience at the court in Vienna, he had his assistant inquire whether he was to appear as a "cow-boy" or an author. The archduchess chose the latter.
There were irritations here and there, which May deftly managed to explain away. One reader was surprised to see the Silberbüchse on display, because the author, in the third volume of the Winnetou series, had described how he had buried his dead friend "with all of his weapons." It was all perfectly explainable, May replied, saying that he had spotted robbers nearby while visiting the grave and had decided to take the costly memento with him. Someone once knocked on his door and asked for a strand of Winnetou's hair. The visitor was overjoyed when the author sent him on his way with a handful of black horsehair.
Lies Exposed
May was also ahead of his time in knowing what he owed his fans. In his letters, he complained about the endless stream of visitors, and yet he rarely told his servants to say that he wasn't home. He answered his fan mail promptly, and he even wrote a description of himself, for his most tenacious admirers, that would forestall today's celebrity profiles in tabloid newspapers: "I wear a moustache and a mouche, both of which, like the hair on my head, were once very dark blonde. Now my hair is beginning to turn a very dignified but unwanted gray, as I am 54 years old, despite looking 10 years younger. My eyes are grayish-blue. I dance every dance, but only when I must. My favorite dish is roast chicken with rice, and my favorite beverage is skim milk."
May's blustering nature also marked him as a man of his time. In his biography, Rüdiger Schaper places him within the genealogy of Wilhelminism, the overheated final phase in the history of the German Empire characterized by hubris and the craving for status. Kaiser Wilhelm II posed in uniforms that changed daily, the dreams of German global dominance continued to expand and the German navy doubled as a vehicle for fantasy. The extravagant and the illusory led to the trenches of World War I, but in May's case they ultimately led in the opposite direction, toward a mystical pacifism with Winnetou, the Apache chief, serving as a sort of red-skinned Christ figure.
At the age of 56, May had arrived at the height of his fame. By now he allegedly spoke 40 languages, including Malay, Kurdish and Swahili, and understood a great deal more -- "more than 1,200 languages and dialects," as he explained to a delighted audience in Munich. The adoration took on such a dramatic scale that the fire department had to be brought in to disperse his admirers.
But then his lies finally caught up with him, when a strange alliance of the gutter press and Christian zealots that converged against May starting in 1899. In addition to the charges that he had deceived the public about his past, his books came under sharp criticism. The self-appointed investigators identified a "deeply amoral" aspect to his works, especially his early trash novels, and one critic even claimed to have discovered "pornographic works of the worst kind."
Legal Battles
In a panic, the author tried to destroy the evidence of his deception, but his attempts were in vain. He had the plates of the photographs taken by his Austrian studio photographer thrown into the Danube, even though thousands of copies of the compromising negatives were already in circulation. Starting with Volume 14, the "Travel Novels" published by Fehsenfeld included a portrait of the author with the caption "Old Shatterhand (Dr. Karl May) with Winnetou's Silberbüchse."
Everything was exposed and examined, including his fake doctorate (from the University of Rouen) and the criminal record he had kept hidden. A huge media spectacle ensued. But May's books still sold, even after he was exposed and brought down as a charlatan.
The legal battles lasted almost 10 years. There were constantly new accusations and defamatory claims, which May fought in court. Could someone describe him as a "born criminal" with impunity, or did this exceed the rights of the critic? The author sank into depression, his writing dried up and he began to experience a sharp pain in his chest that almost took his breath away. May's legal nightmare ended with the redeeming pronouncement that a literary man was entitled to a different, freer perception of the truth. "I consider Karl May to be a poet," Theodor Ehrecke, the chief justice on the Berlin District Court concluded in 1911. But this final judgment could not restore the author's lost health.
A few years before his death on March 30, 1912, May finally made the trip to America. With his Baedeker in hand, the book he had scoffed at in Cairo, May visited New York, Boston and Niagara Falls. The man who had called the Wild West his home dutifully completed the standard tourist circuit, bought souvenirs for himself and his wife, and wrote postcards to Germany.
A sad highlight of his journey was a visit to the reservation where 400 descendants of the once-powerful Tuscarora people, one of the nations of the Iroquois tribes, lived in teepees. A photo depicts the author standing next to the chief, who is wearing suspenders. May knew perfectly well why he preferred the life of the armchair traveler. He knew that reality could rarely compete with fantasy.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Como baixar os juros no Brasil: uma solucao inovadora...(na Espanha)

Não sei se daria certo no Brasil, mas quem sabe o governo dos companheiros não organiza as companheiras -- que eles chamam de "trabalhadoras do sexo", dispondo inclusive de um código e de cadastro no MTb -- para fazer a mesma coisa no Brasil?
Será que os nossos banqueiros -- privados e estatais -- vão ser obrigados a baixar os juros por essa via?
Nunca se perde nada por tentar...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

COM CRISE, PROSTITUTAS DE LUXO SE RECUSAM A FAZER SEXO COM BANQUEIROS

GAROTAS DE PROGRAMA DE MADRI DIZEM QUE “GREVE” SÓ ACABARÁ QUANDO INSTITUIÇÕES FINANCEIRAS OFERECEREM LINHAS DE CRÉDITO MAIORES PARA FAMÍLIAS CARENTES E EMPRESAS

MADRI, NA ESPANHA: PROSTITUTAS PROTESTAM (FOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

Prostitutas de luxo de Madri estão decretando greve de sexo aos seus clientes banqueiros, reportou nesta terça-feira (27/03) o tablóide britânico Daily Mail. Elas pedem para que os funcionários das instituições financeiras abram linhas de crédito para oferecer a famílias carentes e empresas à beira da falência.

A Espanha enfrenta atualmente uma de suas piores crises econômicas, com as taxas de desemprego atingindo 23%. Com as incertezas sobre o mercado de trabalho e pouco dinheiro circulando no país, os bancos diminuem a oferta de crédito a seus clientes.

Nós somos as únicas com capacidade real de pressionar o setor

PROSTITUTA

As garotas de programa dizem que a paralisação continuará até que os banqueiros “cumpram suas responsabilidades sociais” e comecem a oferecer empréstimos maiores à população. “Nós somos as únicas com capacidade real de pressionar o setor”, disse a principal associação de prostituição do país.

Segundo o tablóide, os banqueiros têm tentado contornar o protesto, dizendo que são arquitetos ou engenheiros às prostitutas, mas a tentativa não tem funcionado. Os executivos dos bancos até já acionaram o governo para tentar mediar o assunto.

Para a prostituta conhecida como AnaMG, a paralisação não deve durar muito. “Estamos em greve há três dias e eu não acho que eles agüentem mais tempo”, disse. Ela conta que a ideia veio de Lucia, uma das mulheres da associação, que disse que só faria sexo com o funcionário de um banco se ele concedesse um empréstimo a um conhecido.

A greve de sexo das prostitutas de Madri vem em um momento em que toda a Espanha se prepara para iniciar uma greve geral, marcada para esta quinta-feira. Os trabalhadores protestam contra o elevado grau de desemprego no país e pedem mudanças nas leis trabalhistas – que tornam mais barato para as empresas despedirem seus empregados.

Capitalismo de Estado: matizes a serem registrados

Um artigo interessante, que discute questões relevantes, já abordadas aqui, pela transcrição, por exemplo, do dossiê da revista Economist, sobre o mesmo assunto.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

State capitalism: Is it a rival to market capitalism?

Keith Campbel

Mining Weekly.com, 30th March 2012

Since the start of the current global economic crisis in 2008, there has been renewed interest in the concept of ‘State capitalism’, as distinct from ‘market capitalism’. (The term ‘liberal capitalism’ is shorthand for ‘liberal democracy plus market capitalism’.)

This interest is centred on China more than any other country, in part because of the country’s ability (so far) to ride out the crisis, in part because of the key role it has played in keeping the global economy running while the developed West has been stagnating and in part because China is, unlike India or Brazil or South Korea, not a democracy. This last factor creates the impression of a ‘Chinese model’ of autocracy plus State capitalism that can be compared and contrasted with the ‘Western model’ of liberal capitalism.

There has been considerable debate about the rival merits of these ‘models’ in recent times. Thus, renowned British historian Niall Ferguson, who teaches at Harvard University, in the US, had a recent article on State capitalism in the US academic journal Foreign Policy. In late January, The Economist, of London, had a cover and special report devoted to State capitalism. The topic has also been addressed in the past couple of months by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek. And these are only some, albeit prominent, examples.

Definitions

However, what is meant by State capitalism?

“State capitalism is the situation where the State tries to run a business on a commercial basis,” defines Econometrix director and chief economist Azar Jammine. “China is regarded as the main example.” Ferguson, in his article, quoted (without agreeing with) global political risk consultancy Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer, who wrote that State capitalism saw “governments use various kinds of State-owned companies to manage the exploi- tation of resources that they consider the State’s crown jewels and to create and maintain large numbers of jobs”.

The Economist says: “State capitalism . . . tries to meld the powers of the State with the powers of capitalism. It depends on government to pick winners and promote economic growth. But it also uses tools such as listing State-owned companies on the stockmarket and embracing globalisation.”

One thing State capitalism is not: it is not a synonym for resource nationalism. Resource nationalism has been defined as the control, by the country in whose territory they are located, of in-the-ground (including under- the-seabed) resources and the means of extracting and refining them. (See Mining Weekly January 26, 2007.) State capitalism and resources nationalism are thus very different things.

Another thing that State capitalism is not: it is not new. The Economist cites democratic Japan in the 1950s and Imperial Germany in the 1870s as previous cases, although “never before has it operated on such a scale and with such sophisticated tools”.

State Capitalism and Natural Resources

State-owned companies dominate the global hydrocarbons sector. National oil companies (NOCs), as they are referred to, hold a staggering 77% of the world’s oil reserves.

The biggest oil company in the world is Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, which has 280-million barrels of proven reserves and has a production capacity of 12.5-million barrels per day (although it usually keeps its production at lower levels, partly to preserve reserves and partly for politico-economic reasons). From second to tenth place (in terms or production), the remaining top ten oil com- panies are the National Iranian Oil Company, Petroleos Mexi- canos (better known as Pemex), the Iraq National Oil Company, Exxon Mobil, BP, the China National Petroleum Corporation (which has a publicly listed sub-sidiary called PetroChina), the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and Petroleos de Venezuela (known as PDVSA). (This list was compiled by Forbes magazine in 2010.) Of these companies, only two, Exxon Mobil and BP, are not State-owned.

In the mining sector, however, the picture is very different. The world’s top three miners are all private-sector companies – BHP Billiton, Vale and Rio Tinto. While the number four company, China Shenhua, is a subsidiary of the State-owned Shenhua Group, its market capitalisation in 2010 was half that of Rio Tinto, reported PricewaterhouseCoopers in its Mine 2011 report. Fifth place was held by Xstrata, sixth by Anglo American, seventh by FreeportMcMoRan, eighth by Barrick Gold, ninth by Potash Corporation and tenth by Coal India. Of these, only Coal India is State-owned.

Of course, China as a country has very significant mineral and metal reserves. In 2008, according to thebusinessofmining.com, its share of global production was 37% for iron-ore, 39% for coal, 16% for copper and 97% for rare- earth minerals. In 2009, the country accounted for 6% of copper, 12% of gold and 25% of zinc production. But this pro- duction is spread across some 200 000 mining companies, most of them tiny. However, a small number of major mining com-panies have emerged, with the big three being China Shenhua, the Aluminium Corporation of China (usually known as Chinalco) and China Coal Energy. All are wholly or partly State-owned.

Thus, State capitalism is huge in the global oil and gas industry, but of much less significance in the mining sector. However, there is an important qualification to the latter observation. Chinese State capitalism is characterised by State-owned central holding agency, the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which controls groups of vertically integrated companies (although this control is often, in practice, loose). Because they are vertically integrated, many of these companies, although their core business is not mining, are nevertheless involved in mining (to provide raw materials for their core operations or for energy to power these core operations).

Moreover, with China’s demand for almost all types of mineral, metal and hydrocarbon inputs now exceeding its domestic production, many State-owned enterprises are looking abroad for these resources. In this, they are being supported by the Chinese government, which is particularly uneasy about the country’s dependence, since 1993, on imported oil.

State-owned companies have accounted for 80% of Chinese foreign direct investment, supported by soft loans from State banks. The country’s oil com- panies have been especially active, and deals exchanging infrastructure for oil have become a common business tool for them – and for other Chinese State-owned companies seeking access to other commodities. This, of course, puts private-sector resource companies from other countries at a serious disadvantage.

State Capitalist South Africa

South Africa is a long-standing practitioner of State capitalism. The great bulk of key infrastructure, whether railways, ports, airports, electricity generation and transmission, water and sewage and broadcasting systems, is in the hands of wholly or predominantly State-owned companies. Moreover, the State is the biggest shareholder in national tele- communications giant Telkom with a 39.76% share, with the next biggest shareholder being the Public Investment Corporation – which manages public-sector pension, provident, social security, development and guardian funds – with 9.31%; the biggest private- sector shareholder is Allan Gray Investment Council, with 8.82%. So, although Telkom is not, technically, State-owned, it is certainly State-dominated.

In 2002, the government created the Petroleum, Oil and Gas Corporation of South Africa (PetroSA) as the country’s NOC. It explores for and exploits hydrocarbons both at home and abroad, and owns and operates the largest commercial gas-to-liquids refinery in the world – at Mossel Bay on the country’s south coast. At home, the company operates the FA-EM south coast gasfields and the Oribi and Oryx oilfields, while abroad it has exploration licences in Equatorial Guinea and Namibia. Although a minnow by global standards, the company’s official vision is to “be the leading African energy company”.

PetroSA also undertakes the marketing and trading of oil and petrochemicals and is involved in the development of the country’s refining and liquid fuels logistics system. To this end, the company has a $11-billion project for a refinery with a daily production capacity of 400 000 barrels, which would be sited in the Coega industrial development zone, in the Eastern Cape province. (There is also an alternative feasibility study for a smaller refinery at Coega.) If this project goes ahead, it could involve giant Chinese State-owned oil group Sinopec, with which PetroSA has a memorandum of understanding, signed in September.

BP chief economist Christof Ruehl has cast doubt on the economic logic for this project, called Mthombo by PetroSA. He has warned that Chinese policy was to have self-sufficiency in refinery capacity, which will constrain the growth of the export market, while, at home, such an extra refinery could create a surplus of petrol. PetroSA maintains that the refinery is necessary to replace ageing plants and reduce South Africa’s dependence on exports.

Further, in 2007, the South African government set up the African Exploration, Mining & Finance Corporation (AEMFC), under the Central Energy Fund (CEF), as a first step in the creation of a State-owned mining company. The company has since been awarded 27 exploration rights in South Africa and started the development of its first mine, a coal operation at Vlakfontein some 100 km east of Johannesburg, in February last year. It should start production next year, and the AEMFC hopes to be one of the country’s top five coal producers by 2020.

Earlier this month, the government approved a plan to “hive off” the AEMFC from the CEF, with the mining company to act as the core element in the State’s participation in the mining sector. Government sees the AEMFC as an essential element in its strategy to beneficiate the country’s minerals and the company has already targeted chromium, diamonds, gold, iron-ore, manganese, nickel, platinum, titanium, uranium and vanadium as well as coal.

“I think the South African government has an ideological obsession with State involvement in the economy. The South African government very strongly supports State intervention in the economy,” argues Jammine. “I think the Chinese example is a convenient excuse. Politicians refer to China to justify policy in South Africa. But they ignore the differences. There are huge differences between China and South Africa. The Chinese are seriously embarking on developing their human capital resources whereas South Africa has a dearth of skilled managers and doesn’t seem to be on the way to improving this at the moment. My biggest concern about State capitalism is that the [South African] State has thus far failed to implement projects it has planned and budgeted for. So it cannot run its own companies effectively. I have the same misgivings about the State-owned mining company.”

A New Model?

But is there such a thing as a State capitalist model? Bremmer believes so, and also believes that it is a threat to market capitalism and to democracy in the developing world. Of State capitalism he says: “The State is using markets to create wealth that can be directed as political officials see fit . . . the ultimate motive is not economic (maximising growth) but political [Bremmer’s emphasis] (maximising the State’s power and the leader-ship’s chances of survival). This is a form of capitalism but one in which the State acts as the dominant economic player and uses markets primarily for political gain.”

Ferguson, however, has a different view. “Ultimately, it is an unhelpful oversimplification to divide the world into ‘market capitalist’ and ‘State capitalist’ camps. The reality is that most countries are arranged along a spectrum where both the intent and the extent of State intervention in the economy vary. Only extreme libertarians argue that the State has no role whatsoever to play in the economy.”

Although Ferguson gives no examples, they are easy to find. In strongly free market Chile, copper mining major Codelco is still State-owned. In the US, the country’s national passenger railway company, Amtrak, is State-owned, as are various local commuter and suburban railroads. America also has State-owned electricity-generating companies, of which the most famous is the Tennessee Valley Authority (which, interestingly, is run on a not-for-profit basis).

On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that, under Mao Zedong, the Chinese economy was effectively 100% State-owned, including collectivised agriculture. Today, collectivisation has been abolished and agriculture has been semiprivatised, while the private sector now accounts for more than 60% of the country’s economic output and employs at least 80% of its workforce. Moreover, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao recently publicly called for “more economic and political structural reform” and, although these reforms should be “step by step”, they were nevertheless an “urgent task”, otherwise the huge progress China has made over the past 30 years “may be lost”.

Meanwhile, neither of the two other emerging economic giants, Brazil and India, has shown the slightest indication of taking a State capitalist approach. In fact, in January, the Indian government approached London-listed miner Vedanta Resources to sell its stakes in two of the group’s subsidiaries, Bharat Aluminium and Hindustan Zinc, for $3.2-billion. Vedanta revealed its acceptance of the deal early this month. And, in Brazil, the current centre-left administration last month reinitiated privatisations – the antithesis of State capitalism – by concessioning two airports and a terminal at a third for a total of $14.1-billion.

“The real contest of our time is not between a State-capitalist China and a market-capitalist America, with Europe somewhere in the middle,” wrote Ferguson. “It is a contest that goes on within all three regions as we all struggle to strike the right balance between the economic institutions that generate wealth and the political institutions that regulate and redistribute it. The character of this century . . . will be determined by which political system gets that balance right.”

Edited by: Creamer Media Reporter