Perfeita coordenacao economica governamental: de surpresa em surpresa

Sempre ficarei surpreso, nesta minha vida de retinas fatigadas por constantes leituras de jornais, revistas, blogs e alfarrábios, com a perfeita coordenação governamental em matéria de política econômica. Aliás estou cada vez mais surpreendido...
No espaço de meros dois dias recolhi os mais diversos exemplos de como pode ser perfeita, detalhista, acurada, sensível, bem medida, ponderada (enfim, etc., vocês encontrem outros adjetivos positivos para colocar nas próximas três linhas), a nossa política econômica, tanto a macroeconômica (em especial a cambial), como a setorial, ou microeconômica (com destaque para a política industrial).
Acho que o Financial Times ainda não se acostumou com o nosso padrão de ordem, harmonia, sincronização, graça e beleza (enfim, tudo o que temos nos blocos de Carnaval, incluindo o Cordão da Bola Preta, e podem colocar também aí os blogs de Carnaval, que a Economist também gosta dessas ironias), que possuem nossos coordenadores governamentais, especialmente os três grandes personagens, MiniFaz, MDIC e Bacen, pelas suas siglas conhecidas do mercado.
Mais um pouco, a Standard&Poors e outras agências de rating vão elevar a nossa nota para o máximo permitido, já que as medidas governamentais avançam como se desfilassem na passarela.
Não acreditam?
Basta olhar um pouco o noticiário...
Para completar a análise, acrescento os comentários de dois analistas sem graça...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Declarações de Mantega derrubam dólar, mas BC intervém e cotação sobe

Ministro disse que o governo não vai permitir que a moeda norte-americana caia abaixo de R$ 1,85

• Economistas veem dificuldade nas previsões
• Graça Foster alerta Mantega para dívida da empresa
• Ceará reclama que refinaria está atrasada

====================
Pimentel: câmbio é vigilante e mira R$ 2; Mantega: mais intervenção, se necessário

O regime de câmbio no Brasil é flutuante, “porém vigilante”, para manter a cotação do dólar em torno de R$ 2, disse o ministro do Planejamento, Fernando Pimentel, ao Valor PRO, o serviço de notícias em tempo real do Valor.   “O câmbio é flutuante, mas não saiu do patamar. Ele vai ficar por aí, em torno de RS 2”, disse o ministro, ao negar que as recentes oscilações da moeda possam afetar as decisões de investimento no país. “Claro que, para o sujeito que exporta, faz diferença entre R$ 2,05 e R$ 1,96, mas aí ele tem de ter hedge, aí é o risco do mercado, do câmbio flutuante”, comentou o 
ministro, que defendeu uma taxa competitiva, mas cobrou das empresas iniciativas para aumentar sua própria competitividade.  “Um câmbio que destrua nossa indústria não vamos ter mais, mas também não vamos ter aquela ilusão de uma desvalorização excessiva da moeda brasileira em que todo mundo fica achando que a indústria recuperou a competitividade sem ter mudado uma máquina de lugar, sem ter criado uma tecnologia nova, um software sequer”, acrescentou Pimentel.  O ministro da Fazenda, Guido Mantega, também garantiu que governo não permitirá que o dólar volte a ser cotado a R$ 1,85 e intervirá no mercado caso seja  necessário, assegurou. “O ideal é que não houvesse intervenção, mas isso é sonho. Agora, se houver de novo uma tendência especulativa, se o pessoal se animar, aí estaremos de novo  intervindo”, disse o Mantega. Entre as medidas que o governo poderia tomar, Mantega citou a elevação do Imposto sobre Operações Financeira (IOF) nas operações de ingresso de moeda estrangeira no país e a compra de dólares no mercado. “Se houver tendência especulativa, aumentaremos a intervenção: posso comprar mais reservas e posso reconstituir os IOFs (que foram reduzidos)”, disse, acrescentando que o dólar está flutuando em uma faixa adequada.
O dólar rompeu no final de janeiro o piso de uma banda informal de R$ 2 a R$ 2,10 que vigorou durante boa parte de 2012, e o mercado interpretou esse movimento como um sinal de preocupação com a inflação.  Desde então, o dólar tem ficado em torno de R$ 1,98. “O câmbio está flutuando mais ao sabor do mercado. Flutua sem causar prejuízo ao exportador, não está causando prejuízo ao importador de máquinas e equipamentos. O câmbio encontrou faixa de flutuação razoável”, avaliou Mantega.  

Fontes: Valor e Reuters

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Bagunça geral na política econômica

09 de fevereiro de 2013 | 2h 05

ROLF KUNTZ - O Estado de S.Paulo

Não dá para separar. O estrago na Petrobrás, a inflação disparada, a indústria emperrada e a maquiagem das contas públicas são sintomas do mesmo problema. O governo conseguiu bagunçar tanto a economia quanto a caixa de ferramentas da política econômica. O estrago da caixa é o mais grave. Gasta-se muito tempo discutindo se a presidente Dilma Rousseff e sua troupe de trapalhões ainda levam a sério os três princípios adotados no fim dos anos 90 - meta de inflação, meta de superávit primário e câmbio flutuante. Não se vai muito longe com esse requisitório. O governo pode responder positivamente a todas as perguntas, com as ressalvas de sempre. Tem de haver certa margem de erro para a inflação, o resultado fiscal é sujeito a imprevistos e nenhum regime cambial é estritamente isento de intervenções. Tudo isso parece razoável, mas a conversa oficial é uma embromação. É possível embromar, nesse caso, porque as questões realmente importantes são outras, a começar pela importância atribuída, de fato, às condições básicas de estabilidade. Esse teste permitiria comparar o governo brasileiro com os de outros países latino-americanos. A semelhança mais notável seria, certamente, com a administração da presidente Cristina Kirchner, sobrando uma diferença muito mais de grau que de vocação.
Se o governo brasileiro se importasse realmente com a inflação, a meta seria muito mais baixa, como em outras economias, tanto desenvolvidas quanto em desenvolvimento. Desde 2005 houve mudanças no Brasil e no cenário externo, mas a meta de 4,5% foi mantida, sem nenhum benefício para o País. A tolerância à alta de preços jamais proporcionou à economia brasileira maior eficiência, dinamismo ou competitividade.
Além disso, as autoridades têm agido como se o alvo real fosse qualquer ponto na margem de variação. As ações são conduzidas como se um resultado final de 6,5% fosse perfeitamente aceitável. O presidente do Banco Central (BC), Alexandre Tombini, chegou a classificar como desconfortável o número acumulado até janeiro - 6,15% em 12 meses. Reiterou, no entanto, a disposição de apostar numa acomodação dos preços no segundo semestre. Mero sangue-frio?
A tolerância à inflação permitiu, no ano passado, conciliar a redução de juros desejada pela presidente Dilma Rousseff e a manutenção de uma política fiscal frouxa. Uma gestão mais séria das contas públicas deveria compensar o relaxamento da política monetária a partir dos meses finais de 2011, segundo explicaram, há cerca de um ano e meio, os dirigentes do BC. Essa condição jamais se realizou. O recurso a artifícios para maquiar as contas públicas no fim de 2012 foi um desdobramento dessa história. Mas esse é apenas o dado mais pitoresco.
O resultado concreto foi uma economia brasileira um tanto mais torta. O combate à inflação por meio da política monetária foi suspenso, enquanto a expansão do crédito continuou alimentando a demanda, principalmente de consumo. Essa demanda foi alimentada também por incentivos fiscais concedidos a alguns setores pelo Executivo. Esses incentivos serviram ainda para a redução temporária de alguns preços, com efeito benéfico de curtíssimo prazo nos indicadores de inflação. O desajuste entre a demanda e a capacidade de oferta da indústria nacional criou um vazamento nas contas externas. Sem o aumento da importação, o efeito inflacionário teria sido maior. A produção industrial encolheu porque as fábricas foram incapazes de competir, e o investimento diminuiu.
Sem distinguir objetivos de curto e de longo prazos, desafios conjunturais e problemas estruturais, o governo colheu inflação elevada, estagnação econômica e contas públicas mais frágeis. Ao mesmo tempo, bagunçou a política econômica e seus instrumentos. O BC deixou de combater a inflação, a política de juros foi decidida no Palácio do Planalto, deficiências estruturais foram tratadas como problemas de conjuntura e os preços foram contidos por meio de intervenções tópicas. A redução do imposto sobre os automóveis e outros bens duráveis e a contenção das tarifas de combustíveis entram nesse capítulo. A insistência da presidente em reduzir as contas de energia elétrica, a partir de agora, é uma continuação dessa trapalhada. É uma imprudência tratar o preço final da eletricidade como questão isolada, sem levar em conta os programas de investimento e os vários componentes de custos, incluída a tributação em todos os níveis.
Os danos impostos à Petrobrás são em parte explicáveis por essa confusão de objetivos e políticas, tão característica do governo atual. Mas decorrem também da subordinação da estatal aos interesses político-partidários do Palácio do Planalto, da peculiar diplomacia terceiro-mundista do presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva e da conversão da empresa em instrumento de política industrial. Em vez de cuidar de seus objetivos empresariais e especialmente do enorme desafio da exploração do pré-sal, a companhia foi forçada a atender a uma porção de outras solicitações. Os resultados são indisfarçáveis.
Mas o governo parece impermeável à maior parte dessas lições. O Ministério da Fazenda dispõe-se a adotar novos artifícios para encenar o cumprimento da meta fiscal. Tudo se passa, de fato, como se o resultado real das contas públicas fosse muito menos importante que a sua representação contábil. Sem medidas típicas de política monetária, o BC tem atuado no mercado cambial para desvalorizar o dólar, em mais uma tentativa de influenciar indiretamente a inflação. A conta será parcialmente paga, é claro, pelos setores prejudicados pela valorização do real. De vez em quando, num surto de lucidez, o governo leva em conta as consequências mais amplas de suas decisões. Exemplo disso é a disposição de rever os termos das novas concessões no setor de transportes. Mas surtos desse tipo têm sido raros e brevíssimos e a confusão do voluntarismo volta a se impor.
* JORNALISTA
==============

Furos na economia

9 de fevereiro de 2013 | 16h30

Celso Ming

É carnaval, os foliões sambam nas passarelas, o povo se diverte como pode e, por enquanto, os índices de aprovação da administração Dilma seguem batendo recordes.
Mas os fundamentos da economia do Brasil estão em deterioração. É só conferir o que a atual administração está entregando: uma sucessão de pibinhos, a inflação mais alta desde 2005, o investimento empacado, a indústria em franco esvaziamento, a Petrobrás sangrando em seu caixa, o outrora pujante setor dos biocombustíveis perdendo importância, a balança comercial passando sinais preocupantes; a percepção externa sobre o Brasil piorando aos poucos…
O galardão da presidente Dilma é a área social. As classes médias seguem aumentando. O povo nunca consumiu tanto, nunca viajou tanto. O setor de serviços está em grande expansão. Paradoxalmente, a área mais pujante da economia é o agronegócio, justamente o setor que vem sendo acusado por áreas do governo como o reduto dos ruralistas, da monocultura e da exploração do trabalhador. Apenas um reparo: há dois subsetores no agronegócio que, ao contrário dos outros, enfrentam séria crise: é o já mencionado ramo do açúcar e do álcool, em consequência do represamento dos preços dos combustíveis; e o da laranja, atacado por forte deterioração dos preços internacionais.
O descontentamento começou a espalhar-se numa área até recentemente tida como aliada do governo: o dos empresários. As empresas enfrentam custos crescentes, especialmente de mão de obra, e já não podem contar com o rendimento financeiro para compensar o baixo retorno operacional. É o que explica tantos balanços bem mais fracos do que os apresentados em outros anos. O empresário não se anima a investir porque entende que deixou de ganhar dinheiro – não importando aqui o quanto isso é verdadeiro. Ele só não demite mais porque a situação de pleno emprego tornou mais difícil a contratação de pessoal.
Os cala-bocas da hora não vêm surtindo o efeito desejado. A tão festejada desoneração dos encargos sociais é pouco mais do que uma insignificância. As renúncias fiscais (isenção ou redução de impostos) não podem mais ser mantidas; estão sendo gradativamente revogadas. A desvalorização cambial (alta do dólar) que veio para dar mais competitividade ao setor produtivo, está em parte sendo revertida pelo Banco Central e, em parte, comida pela inflação à proporção de 6% ao ano. E o BNDES não é uma solução para todos porque só contempla os previamente destinados a serem campeões em sua área.
A presidente Dilma parece ter-se convencido de que não pode mais tratar o setor privado a pão e água e que precisa abrir as licitações de projetos de infraestrutura e energia. Mas essa mudança vem um pouco tarde e deverá demorar muito mais a maturar e a dar frutos.
A desenvoltura da inflação preocupa. Se continuar com o discurso de que não é preciso agir porque, logo adiante, a inflação cederá por simples imperativo estatístico, o Banco Central corre o risco de perder ainda mais credibilidade. Já não conduz as expectativas, passou a percepção de que só reage com autorização superior e aceitou passivamente demais à deterioração das contas públicas. Agora pode defrontar-se com a força da inércia inflacionária. Mais ainda, corre o risco de ter de puxar os juros de volta para cima apenas às vésperas das eleições.
CONFIRA


Acima, uma relação de 12 produtos ou serviços consumidos no carnaval e a carga tributária incidente sobre cada um deles.
 

Anatomia da decadencia instittucional brasileira - Ricardo Velez-Rodriguez

Uma das melhores análises, que já li, sobre as razões, as formas e o processo de nossa erosão institucional, começada sob o lulo-petismo e continuada desde então com cada vez maior violência verbal pelos quadrilheiros e mafiosos que tentam dominar a República e fazer do crime político (e até do crime comum) uma coisa comum, uma simples banalidade da vida.
Nunca antes neste país bandidos disfarçados de políticos haviam perpetrado tantos assaltos à normalidade democrática. Também nunca antes neste país, a sociedade assiste tão inerme a esses assaltos constantes à moralidade e à honestidade republicana.
Até quando o Brasil vai suportar tanta corrupção, tanta desfaçatez, tanta falta de vergonha no trato da coisa pública?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

DENGUE PATRIMONIALISTA
Ricardo Vélez-Rodríguez
Blog Rocinante, 9/02/2013

A posse de Renan Calheiros como presidente do Senado, mais do que um episódio regular da vida política brasileira, está a indicar a entropia das nossas Instituições. Não apenas pelos paradoxais discursos pronunciados ao ensejo da posse pelo próprio Calheiros e por figuras que, décadas atrás, foram esconjuradas da cúpula do governo por práticas não republicanas, como o senador Collor de Melo, que do alto da tribuna fez sérias acusações contra o Procurador Geral da República, pressupondo que as ações públicas deste estivessem motivadas, apenas, por baixos interesses de proveito pessoal. O fato de Renan Calheiros se apresentar como paladino da ética, num momento em que está sendo questionado pelo Ministério Público, em denúncia que foi apresentada pela Procuradoria ao Supremo por prática de atos contrários à dignidade republicana é, no mínimo, um acinte aos cidadãos que ainda acreditamos que é possível viver num país civilizado. De outro lado, a posse, na presidência da Câmara, do deputado Enrique Alves, cuja proposta governativa se centra na manutenção de práticas clientelistas que atrelam o Congresso ao Executivo (como as emendas parlamentares), completa o quadro de desmoralização do Legislativo.

As coisas não seriam tão graves se correspondessem, apenas, a uma crise ética e política do Congresso. Acontece que a doença é mais radical. Os sintomas da decomposição inserem-se no contexto mais amplo de uma maré negra que aponta para a desmoralização total das Instituições Republicanas, num fatídico balé que tem como regente o ex-presidente Lula.

Os próximos alvos, nessa empreitada de morte cívica, serão a cabeça do Judiciário e do Ministério Público, na retomada do processo de desmoralização já iniciado pelo lulopetismo contra o Presidente do Supremo e contra o Procurador Geral da República. Alvo já anunciado dos ataques da petralhada será também a Imprensa, que passará a ser acusada pela instabilidade política, numa manobra leninista de acusação, pela militância, das próprias culpas. Afinal, quem mais tem trabalhado em prol da instabilidade é o próprio lulopetismo, que tem buscado de forma incessante colocar a República, exclusivamente, a serviço de Lula e dos interesses partidários.

Em paralela, eficaz e deletéria ação, o crime organizado vai cumprindo o seu papel de amedrontar os cidadãos, mediante uma prática que, no século passado, Pablo Escobar pôs em funcionamento na decomposição colombiana: o assassinato sistemático de policiais e a realização rigorosamente programada de atos de terrorismo que têm como finalidade fragilizar ainda mais a psique coletiva, como está acontecendo, de vários meses para cá, em São Paulo e no interior de Estados outrora pacíficos como Santa Catarina. Afinal, se se trata de colocar o Brasil a serviço de interesses particulares, o crime organizado aproveita a brecha e pratica a sua própria demolição das Instituições.

O lulopetismo age, no tecido social brasileiro, como aqueles aracnídeos altamente peçonhentos que inoculam nas suas vítimas o fatal veneno que, aos poucos, lhes paralisa os membros, reduzindo-as totalmente à inação e à morte. Na caminhada de séculos do Patrimonialismo brasileiro, nessa dança macabra de privatização de tudo para obedecer às instâncias familisticas de um clientelismo rastacuera, o lulopetismo não tem paralelo nos itens de cinismo e eficácia. O homem do chapéu está conseguindo cooptar todo mundo, criando um consenso fatídico ao redor da desmoralização das instituições republicanas. É o capítulo que antecede à morte cívica e ao império de um desolador peronismo à brasileira, como já previu Fernando Henrique Cardoso. “Nunca antes na história deste país” tinha se apresentado alguém, como Lula, dotado de tão grande carisma, arguto e excelente articulador, pondo tudo a serviço de uma era de domínio unipessoal e da companheirada.

Não cometamos a injustiça histórica de comparar esse quadro do avanço patrimonialista com o do getulismo ou com o do regime de 64. Nestes dois momentos da nossa história, ergueu-se proposta de modernização autoritária, para esconjurar forças dissolventes arregimentadas pelo totalitarismo de plantão e para dotar o país das instituições sociais e da infraestrutura que lhe garantiriam entrar no mundo da industrialização. Nunca concordei com esse viés autoritário. Teria sido possível, sim, modernizar o Brasil, preservando os institutos do governo representativo e do respeito aos direitos individuais. Teríamos dado um passo bem à frente do tradicional patrimonialismo modernizador na América Latina. Mas não há dúvida quanto ao fato de que, tanto no getulismo quanto no regime militar, o país se modernizou. Ora, isso não aconteceu na década lulopetista. Tudo aquilo que parecia programado para efetivamente democratizar e modernizar de vez a nossa vida política terminou desaguando no mais deslavado clientelismo, num projeto de cooptação amplo, geral e irrestrito da sociedade pelo Executivo hipertrofiado, sem a mínima racionalidade para com a política econômica e sem o cuidado necessário para com a manutenção sadia das nossas contas públicas iniciado com o Plano Real. Estão aí os processos de cooptação dos institutos de pesquisa, como o IPEA e o IBGE, que gozavam outrora de grande credibilidade, e que a petralhada no poder conseguiu desprestigiar, por tê-los colocado a serviço da propaganda governamental.

Estão aí, também, os índices de crescimento econômico que despencam, junto com a credibilidade de estatais como a Petrobrás. Está aí a inflação que volta a assombrar os nossos lares, com remarcação geral de preços e com endividamento crescente dos cidadãos. Está aí a sombria tendência à desindustrialização, que preocupa cada vez mais os nossos empreendedores. Estão aí os crescentes índices de queda da competitividade dos nossos produtos, afetada pela instabilidade jurídica e pelo gasto público descontrolado que não moderniza a infraestrutura. Está aí, enfim, a gastança do dinheiro público sem nenhum controle, efetivada pelos sindicatos (desonerados, por Lula, da obrigação de prestar contas ao TCU), e pelo próprio governo federal, nessa corrida maluca das políticas sociais, erradamente concebidas sem contrapartida dos beneficiários e sem a devida transparência, do PAC e das obras preparatórias para a Copa do Mundo e as Olimpíadas, que já vai superando, aceleradamente, os limites previstos, fazendo desembestar o dragão inflacionário. Os obscuros episódios da Delta e da intermediação do meliante Cachoeira foram empurrados para baixo do tapete pela espertice lulista, ao ensejo do encerramento da correspondente CPI, que foi estimulada pelo ex-presidente Lula unicamente para deitar uma cortina de fumaça sobre o mensalão, mas que terminou abrindo mais um flanco na já fraca credibilidade do governo.

Dadas as repetidas investidas do desgoverno de Dilma e do lulismo em ação contra a transparência e contra a sadia gestão da economia, poderíamos terminar este quadro sombrio com mais uma imagem tomada de empréstimo à entomologia. O Brasil é, hoje, vítima da terceira epidemia da dengue patrimonalista, que se seguiu às duas outras sofridas durante os governos de Lula. Conseguirá o corpo social da Nação agüentar toda essa carga negativa?

O fim da esquerda latino-americana? - Alvaro Vargas Llosa

The End of the Latin American Left

Will Hugo Chávez's revolution die with him?

BY ALVARO VARGAS LLOSA 

Foreign Policy, February 7, 2013

The exact condition of Hugo Chávez continues to be a Churchillian riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The Venezuelan president, who won his third reelection last October and has been hospitalized in Cuba for many weeks with cancer, missed his own inauguration in January. In his absence, Vice President Nicolás Maduro, Chávez's hand-picked successor, has been left in charge of the government indefinitely. But Maduro is no Chávez, lacking both the charisma and the power base of Venezuela's mercurial leader. And it's not just a problem for the chattering classes in Caracas: The question haunting the Latin American hard left, which Chávez has dominated in the last decade, is who will take his place.

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In explaining the rise of the political left in Latin America over the past decade, Chávez's persona looms large. Politicians like Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Chávez for laying the groundwork toward a renewed form of populism, Latin America's version of socialism. Chávez's illness has only served to highlight that debt. "The issue of the health of brother Chávez is a problem and a worry not just of Venezuela, but of all the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist people," Morales said in January, speaking from behind a podium reading, "We Are All Chávez." But Chávez's charisma and ruthless political genius fail to explain why he has been able to achieve such regional clout. Through a canny use of petrodollars, subsidies to political allies, and well-timed investments, Chávez has underwritten his Bolivarian revolution with cash -- and lots of it. But that effective constellation of money and charisma has now come out of alignment, leaving a power vacuum that will be difficult for Chávez's political heirs across the hemisphere to fill.
Several Latin American leaders would like to succeed him, but no one meets the necessary conditions: Cuba's blessing, a fat wallet, a country that carries enough demographic, political and economic weight, potent charisma, a willingness to take almost limitless risks, and sufficient autocratic control to allow him or her to devote major time to permanent revolution away from home.
What will happen is partly in Cuba's hands. Because Cuba has made Venezuela into its foreign-policy proxy, the Castro brothers need Caracas to remain the capital of the movement for it to retain any vitality. While Cuba is dependent on the roughly 100,000 barrels of heavily subsidized oil Chávez's regime supplies to Cuba daily, the island nation has a grip on Venezuela's intelligence apparatus and social programs. Chávez himself acknowledged last year that there are almost 45,000 Cuban "workers" manning many of his programs, though other sources speak of an even larger number. This strong connection allows Cuba to exercise a vicarious influence over many countries in the region. Caracas's clout in Latin America stems from Petrocaribe, a mechanism for helping Caribbean and Central American countries purchase cheap oil, and ALBA, an ideological alliance that promotes "21st century socialism." The combination of the two gives Caracas, and therefore Havana, some authority over the politics of 17 other countries.
What does this mean for the future of the left? Essentially that Cuba will do its utmost to prop up Maduro. Chávez's chosen man will never be a revered figure -- his talents as a politician are lackluster -- but with Havana's backing and control of the money funneled to the region's leaders, he will retain some of Chavez's stature. In recent months, he and what might be called the civilian nucleus of the Venezuelan government have been a constant presence in Havana, where they have relied on the information supplied to them by Cuba about Chávez's real condition. This clique is comprised mainly of Rosa Virginia, Chávez's eldest daughter; her husband Jorge Arreaza, who is also a minister; Cilia Flores, Maduro's wife and the prosecutor general of the regime; and, finally, Rafael Ramírez, the head of the oil giant PDVSA.
Maduro has made most of his key political announcements from Havana, often flanked by some of these people as a way to consolidate his legitimacy inside the Venezuelan military, where he has rivals, and of course the Latin American left writ large. It seems to have worked for now: The region's left lent him dutiful support through various regional bodies when the opposition denounced the arrangements that have turned him into an acting president indefinitely. In a statement put out by Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, the Organization of American States supported the constitutional arrangements in Venezuela in the wake of Chavez´s absence -- and incurred the ire of MUD, the united opposition.
Critical in all of this is the money at Maduro's disposal. The sales of PDVSA, the state-owned oil cash cow, amounted to $124.7 billion in 2011, of which one-fifth went to the state in the form of taxes and royalties, and another fourth was channeled directly into a panoply of social programs. This kind of management makes for very bad economics, a reason why the company needs to resort to debt to fund its basic capital expenditures, and for decreasing productivity, but it remains crucial for the regime and the Latin American left. Funding social programs at home and subsidizing oil shipments abroad, as well as giving cash to various foreign entities, is in good part what makes Caracas the epicenter of the left. Consequently, the support Maduro enjoys from Cuba and the money at his disposal offsets his lack of Chávez-like charisma.
Although Venezuela's current economic debacle has had a debilitating effect on the system described above, as has Chávez's ill health, China has helped mitigate the impact. The China Development Bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China have lent Caracas $38 billion to fund some social programs, a bit of infrastructure spending, and purchases of Chinese products and services. Another $40 billion has been promised to fund part of the capital expenditures needed to maintain the flow of oil committed to Beijing. The oxygen provided by Beijing gives Caracas some ability to grease the regional machinery despite the domestic crisis.
Cuba's support for Maduro and his oil money notwithstanding, there will still be a vacuum of sorts at the top of the Latin American left after the vice president takes over from Chávez on a permanent basis -- assuming he is able to consolidate his own power internally and fend off his military rivals. Other Latin American leaders will clearly see an opening at least to enlarge their role if not lead the left outright.
Argentina's Kirchner is already trying. As she has further radicalized in response to an acute economic crisis at home and the rise of an opposition both within the ranks of her party and among the large middle class, in looking for a major Latin American role she has departed from traditional Peronismo. In the last year, she has made her country's claim to the Falkland Islands, now under British control, a focal point of her foreign policy, obtaining explicit support at Mercosur (the South American common market) and UNASUR (the Union of South American Nations). Until recently, she limited her rapport with Caracas to business and occasional gestures rather than ideology -- Buenos Aires sold sovereign bonds to Caracas a few years ago and was later able to import fuel cheaply and sign trade deals. Now she makes trips to Havana too and has raised her voice in denouncing the usual imperialist suspects -- certain liberal democracies, foreign investors, international courts, and the IMF. By adopting this tone, she hopes to rally the base at a difficult time. She is currently barred from seeking reelection in 2015 but is aiming to change the constitution to allow her to seek another term, a move laden with certain Chávismo overtones.
There are, however, limits to her potential role as a leader of the Latin American left. The most important one is economic. The statist, populist Argentine model is now bankrupt. Economic growth was minimal in 2012, a year that also saw record inflation and the expansion of capital controls to prevent a stampede of dollars. This would not be an insurmountable political obstacle were it not for the fact that a majority of Argentineans are now opposed to her -- her approval rating is down to 30 percent -- and that her own party is fractured. It is one thing to fight the "fascist right" as the head of a united Peronista front. But it is quite another for Kirchner to be denounced more stridently by her leftist base than by the center-right. Apart from the fact that she lacks the funds to finance regional revolution -- despite running the largest populist economy in Latin America -- Kirchner can ill afford to devote her attention to foreign matters. Last but not least, Argentina is too large and too proud a country for it to accept near-subordination to Cuba, a key condition for leading the Latin American rebels.
What about Bolivia's Morales? Given the symbolism of his indigenous roots, he seems a strong prospective candidate. But he is geographically too far from Havana -- Chávez´s constant pilgrimages to Cuba would be hard for Morales to replicate. He too has mounting problems at home, where his social and political base is now severely split. Unlike Chávez, who has been able to group his different supporters under a socialist umbrella organization, Morales's party, MAS, has become isolated from the myriad social movements that once backed him and now claim he is not delivering on promises of social justice. His main fights have not been with the right but with these organizations, which have paralyzed the country at various times.
Like other populists, Morales has some cash at his disposal through the sale of natural resources. But private investment is tiny in Bolivia, and Morales has doubled the proportion of the economy directly under government control. Because he needs to pour resources into populist economic programs to keep his enemies at bay, Morales cannot afford to fund foreign adventures. In fact, his need for cash is forcing him to charge Kirchner, a close ally, about four times more for Bolivia's natural gas than the going rate in Argentina's own gas-producing region, the Neuquen Basin. Lastly, Bolivia's economy is tiny, amounting to just 8 percent of Venezuela's.
Correa, who as president of Ecuador heads an oil-producing country, is another possibility. He certainly has the ambition and is the intellectual alpha male of the pack. His inevitable reelection this month will give him renewed vigor. But his country produces five times less oil than Venezuela and, with an economy less than a fifth the size, is in no position to command leadership regionally. After tripling government spending since he came to power in 2007, Correa's coffers face a fiscal deficit of 7.7 percent of GDP. And because it defaulted on part of the national debt in 2008, Ecuador is barred from capital markets. If not for the $7 billion-plus lifeline China has thrown Correa in advance payments for oil and credits, the country's financial situation would be dire. Given that 80 percent of Ecuador's oil exports have been pledged as guarantee against these loans, Correa would never be able to subsidize other countries.
That leaves Brazil, the single most powerful Latin American country and a symbol of ideological moderation that may well hold the key to the destiny of the Latin American left -- if only it wanted to. Until now, Brazil has deliberately given Chávez the space to play a disproportionate role in the neighborhood. Since former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had Marxist roots and a radical base to please, he made up for his responsible domestic policies by tolerating, and sometimes encouraging, Chávez's leadership of the regional left. In foreign policy, Lula preferred to spend his time cementing ties with the other BRIC countries and collecting allies in Africa, partly with a view to building up support for a permanent seat at the U.N. Security Council. The rest was spent cozying up to the United States's adversaries, including Iran, and proposing solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian question (an initiative for which he teamed up with Turkey).
Dilma Rousseff, the current Brazilian president and Lula's political heir, has moderated her country's foreign policy but is conscious of the fact that her overbearing predecessor and the party base want close relations with the left. This is a major reason for having kept Marco Aurélio Garcia, a man umbilically connected with the regional populists, as a foreign policy advisor.
But Dilma is not personally interested in leading Latin America's left. Her country's main economic tool in Latin America, the Brazilian development bank BNDES, funds mostly domestic companies investing in the region, not other governments, and its disbursements in Latin America totaled a mere $1 billion last year. An initiative for integrating South America's infrastructure led by Brazil, known as IIRSA, lacks a political or ideological imprint. Dilma also confronts an economic challenge that Lula was spared. Growth has stalled (it barely cracked 1 percent last year), and some serious soul-searching is underway about why the emerging star of the last decade is now facing the prospect of a mediocre future if new reforms are not undertaken.
All of this points to the Cuba-Venezuela connection continuing to play a pivotal role through Maduro. That said, Maduro will have considerably less ability to project influence than when Chávez was at the helm. Presumably, the vacuum partially left by Chávez will see various forces vying for an increased role, including Kirchner as the radicalized Peronista running the largest populist economy, while Morales and Correa, as well as Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, call attention to themselves without the necessary power to back their chutzpah. Brazil will arbitrate among these leftists and wait to see what emerges before throwing its lot with anyone.
With no viable leader to take up Chávez's mantle, the future portends disarray for the Latin American left. Fearful that this may spell the end of the movement, there is but one miracle the left can cling to -- that Chávez finds a way to rise from his Havana deathbed.

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LEO RAMIREZ/AFP/Getty Images

 SUBJECTS: OIL, ECONOMICS, VENEZUELA, LATIN AMERICA

 

Alvaro Vargas LLosa is senior fellow at the Independent Institute. His new book, Global Crossings: Immigration, Civilization and America, will be published in June.

Google desvaloriza os BRICS: Brasil com cotacao baixa...

Como a sigla foi criada por um economista, e implementada artificialmente por políticos ambiciosos, nada demais contra os ups and downs do movimento das bolsas. A cotação dos Brics (antes Bric) já foi mais alta, e a do Brasil sempre foi supervalorizada artificialmente, pela propaganda do governo, pelo superativismo ministerial, pela exuberância diplomática e a egolatria do presidente anterior. Nada errado, portanto, com o debunk atual, que é sempre bem vindo, pois melhor atuar com base em perspectivas realistas do que infladas por impulsos artificiais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

BRICs Fall From Google Favor as Searches Drop With Brazil

By Michael Patterson & Victoria Stilwell 

Bloomberg News, Feb 8, 2013 1:38 AM ET

The BRICs are falling off the investment map.
The term for Brazil, Russia, India and China, where stocks gained 424 percent during the decade ended 2010, appeared in the fewest news stories last month since November 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. BRIC searches on Google Inc.’s website fell to a seven-year low in December, while mutual funds that invest in the biggest emerging markets had outflows in 46 of the past 47 weeks.

Enlarge image

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's president, from left, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, Hu Jintao, China's president, and Jacob Zuma, South Africa's president, stand and present the Delhi Declaration at the BRICS Summit in New Delhi, India, on Thursday, March 29, 2012. Photographer: Graham Crouch/Bloomberg

1:41

Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Zeb Eckert reports on today's top headlines. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "First Up." (Source: Bloomberg)

Investor euphoria has turned into apathy after the four economies grew at the slowest pace since 2009 and the MSCI BRIC Index trailed world markets for a third straight year. The man who came up with the BRIC moniker -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jim O’Neill -- announced his retirement this week.
“It looks like investors, certainly the trend-following types, have lost interest,” O’Neill, who will step down as chairman of Goldman Sachs’ asset management unit this year after about 18 years at the New York-based bank, said in a Feb. 5 phone interview.
O’Neill, 55, introduced the BRIC concept in a 2001 research report predicting that the countries’ share of the global economy would increase. His colleagues at Goldman Sachs estimated two years later that the nations may join the U.S. and Japan as the world’s biggest economies by 2050.

‘Like a Brick’

The bullish outlook proved prescient as the BRIC countries grew at an average annual pace of 6.6 percent from 2001 to 2010, almost twice as fast as the global economy, according to the International Monetary Fund in Washington. China is now the world’s second-largest economy in dollar terms, while Brazil is No. 7, Russia is No. 9 and India is No. 10, IMF estimates for 2012 showed in October.
Goldman Sachs’ prediction helped unleash a flood of money into the BRIC countries. Investors poured about $15 billion into mutual funds that buy stocks in all four nations, along with another $52 billion into funds dedicated to individual members of the group, from 2001 through 2010, according to Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research firm EPFR Global.
The name stuck. Investors “wanted something that was simple,” Christopher Palmer, who oversees about $2.5 billion as the London-based director of global emerging markets at Henderson Global Investors Ltd., said by phone Feb. 5. “BRIC is a nice marketing concept, and it sounds quite solid, like a brick.”

Slowing Growth

The MSCI BRIC index’s 424 percent return through 2010, including dividends, compares with a 44 percent gain for the MSCI All-Country World Index and 350 percent for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. That means $10,000 invested in the BRICs grew to about $52,400 during the period.
Now, the nations’ shares are lagging behind as their economic growth advantage shrinks and investors shift money to smaller emerging markets, including Turkey and the Philippines. Gross domestic product in the BRICs probably increased 4.2 percent on average in 2012, versus 3.2 percent for the world economy, according to the IMF. The 1 percentage point gap would be the smallest since 1998.
The MSCI BRIC index lost 9.2 percent from the end of 2010 through yesterday, compared with a 2.4 percent slide in MSCI’s emerging-market index and a 13 percent advance in the MSCI All- Country gauge. The four-nation measure is up about 2.2 percent this year, versus a 4.3 percent increase in the global index.

O’Neill Bullish

The BRIC gauge slipped 0.1 percent at 6:07 a.m. in London, heading for a fifth day of declines, the longest stretch since Nov. 16. The measure is down 2.3 percent this week.
Brazil, Russia, India, China and BRIC funds have recorded combined outflows of about $8.3 billion since 2010 even as those investing in global emerging markets had inflows of $70 billion, EPFR Global data show.
The BRICs have “now become unfashionable,” John-Paul Smith, an emerging markets strategist at Deutsche Bank AG in London who predicted the underperformance of BRIC shares in 2011, said in a report e-mailed Jan. 24.
O’Neill disagrees. Fading interest in the countries is a contrarian indicator that may foreshadow world-beating equity returns this year as China’s economy recovers, he said.
“It’s my hunch, because of China, that the BRIC index will outperform,” O’Neill said by phone from London.

Relative Value

The Shanghai Composite Index has climbed 6.6 percent this year as consumer purchases support a rebound in economic growth. China’s expansion accelerated in the fourth quarter for the first time in two years, with GDP increasing 7.9 percent from a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing. Retail sales climbed 15.2 percent in December.
Low valuations are another reason to be bullish, O’Neill said. The MSCI BRIC index trades for 10 times reported earnings, versus 16 times for the MSCI All-Country gauge. The 36 percent discount for the BRIC measure compares with an average gap of 24 percent since Bloomberg began compiling the data in July 2009.
“They trade at a significant discount, certainly to their own past,” O’Neill said. “The key part of the BRIC story, the C, which is the same size as the other three put together, seems to me to be even stronger than ever.”
The BRICs risk undoing their achievements of the past decade by increasing the state’s role in markets, Nouriel Roubini, the chairman of Roubini Global Economics LLC in New York who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, said in a Jan. 25 interview at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The countries “have been hyped up too much,” Roubini said.

Petrobras Tumbles

In Brazil, the government fixes energy prices to rein in inflation, which has exceeded the 4.5 percent midpoint of the central bank’s target range for more than two years. That means fuel imports have curbed earnings at Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil’s state-run oil producer, as it pays more for gasoline and diesel bought abroad than it charges distributors.
While the government authorized a fuel price increase Jan. 29, the adjustment trailed analysts’ estimates and voting shares of the Rio de Janeiro-based company dropped 5.1 percent the next day. Petrobras tumbled 8.3 percent Feb. 5 to the lowest level since August 2005 after saying that it will reduce dividends.
Brazil’s benchmark Bovespa Index has declined 4.2 percent this year through Feb. 7 and is down 16 percent since the end of 2010. The BSE India Sensitive Index has gained 0.8 percent in 2013 and Russia’s Micex Index has increased 3.5 percent.

Fading Links

The number of news stories containing the term BRIC fell to 317 in January, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from more than 100 news sources. That’s 87 percent less than the record high in March 2011, a week before the MSCI BRIC index reached an almost three-year peak.
Google, operator of the world’s most-popular search engine, had the fewest queries on BRIC in December since February 2005. While the level of interest has since increased, it’s still about 17 percent lower than a year ago and 48 percent below the June 2009 high, according to Google’s Trends website.
Equity gauges in Shanghai, Mumbai, Moscow and Sao Paulo that once moved in lockstep with the MSCI BRIC index are losing their links to the benchmark.
The Shanghai Composite’s 30-day correlation with the MSCI gauge dropped to 0.2 on Jan. 9, the lowest level since January 2012, from as high as 0.8 in September, data compiled by Bloomberg show. A reading of 1 means two markets move in tandem, while a level of -1 means they move in opposite directions.
The relationship for India’s Sensex declined to the lowest level since November 2009 this month, while the reading for the Micex reached a four-year nadir. The Bovespa had the weakest correlation since March 2008 in October.
“People aren’t talking about them as a group any more, but talking about the countries separately,” Timothy Ghriskey, the chief investment officer at Solaris Group LLC in New York, which manages about $2 billion and has equity holdings in India and Brazil, said by phone Feb. 5. “Each one has a different investment climate, different issues.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Michael Patterson in Hong Kong at mpatterson10@bloomberg.net; Victoria Stilwell in New York at vstilwell1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Emma O’Brien at eobrien6@bloomberg.net; Darren Boey at dboey@bloomberg.net

Comunismo e fascismo: dois irmaos diabolicos - Vladimir Tismaneanu

O diabo está nos detalhes, se costuma dizer. Mas, no caso do comunismo e do fascismo, as duas ideologias, os dois regimes, os dois males mais mortíferos do século 20 (talvez de toda a história humana, incluindo as hordas de bárbaros da Idade Média), o diabo está não só nos detalhes, mas no conjunto.
De fato, o diabo figura nas propostas, nas intenções, nos atos feitos e malfeitos desses dois sistemas, que devem ter provocado, conjuntamente, mais de cem milhões de mortos, matados e morridos (ou seja, direta e indiretamente) no que foi esse "breve" século 20, que segundo um marxista não arrependido, Eric J. Hobsbawm, teria durando apenas de 1917 a 1989, para todos os efeitos práticos. Na verdade, o fascismo (clássico, pelo menos) foi bem mais curto, entre 1922, ou 1924, desde a conquista e consolidação do poder por Mussolini, e 1945, quando Hitler se suicida, deixando atrás de si uma Alemanha em ruínas e mais de 20 milhões de mortos, pelo menos...
O bolchevismo, em sua feitura lenino-stalinista, durou bem mais, e matou muito mais, embora em doses menos concentradas do que o fascismo italiano (mais "ameno) e o nazismo hitlerista (mais "mortífero", em sua sanha assassina e absolutamente brutal). Ele foi de 1918 a 1953, quando o ditador assassino morre. Junto com o comunismo da coexistência pacífica, a partir de Krushev, e os diversos experimentos ao redor do mundo, o comunismo, em sua longa história de mais algumas décadas (foram setenta anos, no total), matou mais alguns milhões, em surtos esporádicos de loucura e de resiliência. Na Coreia do Norte, por exemplo, que é um regime stalinista-surrealista, a matança continua, ao passo que em Cuba, as mortes de um sistema nefando, que conseguiu o notável feito, jamais igualado na história, de expulsar mais de um décimo da população da ilha, foram comparativamente menores (mas não menos desculpáveis, pois sempre advindas não por "acidente" do sistema, mas por atos deliberados dos dirigentes delinquentes).
Este autor romeno, da geração pós-guerra, instalado nos Estados Unidos, examina a interface diabólica dos dois sistemas assassinos, na resenha publicada no Times Literary Suplement.
Vou comprar o livro, para ler com atenção, não que eu tenha muito a aprender historicamente com o que se passou, mas porque eu acho que certos elementos das ideologias dos dois sistemas assassinos ainda estão presentes entre nós, aliás muito presentes entre certos companheiros...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Communism, Fascism and liberals now

John Gray

Vladimir Tismaneanu
THE DEVIL IN HISTORY
Communism, Fascism, and some lessons of the twentieth century
326pp. University of California Press. $34.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £24.95.
978 0 520 23972 2

Times Literary Suplement, 2 January 2013

D iscussing the Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People promulgated in the Soviet Union in January 1918, in which sections of the population regarded as “former people” were disenfranchised, Vladimir Tismaneanu writes: “It can hardly be considered a coincidence that the term byvshie liudi (former people), which became commonplace in Bolshevik speak, implied that those to whom it applied were not quite human”. The disenfranchised groups included functionaries of the tsarist police and military, class aliens who lived off unearned income, clergy of all religions and anyone economically dependent on those so far listed. Debarred from the rationing system (for many the chief source of sustenance), liable to have their property confiscated, and prohibited from seeking public office, people in these categories – along with their families, since being a former person was defined as an inheritable condition – were excluded from society. The system of categories, Tismaneanu writes, was “the prototype taxonomy for the terror that was to follow in later years”. Denying some human groups the moral standing that normally goes with being a person, this act formed the basis for the Soviet project of purging society of the human remnants of the past.
It is also one of the grounds for Tismaneanu’s belief that in important respects Communism and Fascism were at one. He is clear that “Communism is not Fascism, and Fascism is not Communism. Each totalitarian experiment has its own irreducible attributes”. Even so, the two were alike in viewing mass killing as a legitimate instrument of social engineering.
“Communism, like Fascism, undoubtedly founded its alternative, illiberal modernity on the conviction that certain groups could be deservedly murdered. The Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered.”
It is an observation that points to the central issue in the debate about twentieth-century totalitarianism. Ever since it was first developed by the Italian theorist of Fascism Giovanni Gentile – who approved of the system of unlimited government that totalitarianism denotes – the concept has been highly controversial. With many viewing Communist and Fascist regimes as too dissimilar in their structures, objectives and ruling ideas to be included in a single category and some seeing theories of totalitarianism as not much more than a rationale for Cold War struggles, the idea has moved from being widely contested to being distinctly unfashionable – in academic contexts, a more damningly final dismissal. For those who have lived in totalitarian regimes, this is a perplexing development. Tismaneanu writes vividly of his own experience. A child of Jewish parents who became Communist activists as part of the struggle against Fascism (his father lost an arm fighting in the Spanish Civil War, while his mother worked as a nurse), he first began thinking about totalitarianism when as a teenager in Communist Romania he read a clandestinely circulated copy of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Later, as a sociology student at the University of Bucharest, he managed to get hold of forbidden books by writers such as Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kolakowski and other anti-totalitarian thinkers. Also drawn to what he calls “the occulted traditions of western Marxism”, he did a doctorate on the Frankfurt School. Leaving Romania in 1981 and settling in the United States, he revisited the country on a regular basis after the toppling of Nicolae Ceausescu. In 2006 he was made head of a presidential commission established to examine the workings of the Communist dictatorship, an appointment that proved controversial, not least because of his parents’ and his own Communist past.
Tismaneanu has produced numerous studies of Stalinism, nationalism and totalitarianism, but it seems to be the parallels between the Ceauzescu regime and interwar Fascism that have come to preoccupy him. “Although Romania was a socialist state committed to Marxist tenets and thus ostensibly left-wing, especially after 1960, the ruling party started to embrace themes, motifs, and obsessions of the interwar Far Right.” After Ceausescu came to power in 1965, “the ideology came to blend residual Leninism with an unavowed yet unmistakable Fascism”. As Tismaneanu came to realize, “This was only an apparent paradox”. European Fascism was a mishmash of mad and bad ideas – clerical authoritarianism and anti-liberal Nietzschean atheism, a neo-primitivist cult of “thinking with the blood” and modernist worship of technology, among others. But ethnocentric nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism have been features of Fascism in all its varieties, and it is the Communist embrace of these far right themes that forms the background for The Devil in History. If his parents joined forces with Communism in order to resist Fascism, it has fallen to Tismaneanu to grapple with the fact that Communism acquired some of Fascism’s defining characteristics.
An ambitious and challenging rereading of twentieth-century history, The Devil in History is most illuminating in showing that parallels between the two totalitarian experiments existed from the beginning. Tismaneanu confesses to being baffled by what he describes as “the still amazing infatuation of important intellectuals with the communist Utopia”. “It is no longer possible to maintain and defend a relatively benign Lenin”, he writes, “whose ideas were viciously distorted by the sociopath Stalin.” Unlike Stalin, Lenin showed no signs of psychopathology. Rather than being an expression of paranoia, methodical violence and pedagogic terror were integral features of Bolshevik doctrine. By their own account, Lenin and his followers acted on the basis of the belief that some human groups had to be destroyed in order to realize the potential of humanity. These facts continue to be ignored by many who consider themselves liberals, and it is worth asking why.
Underlying academic debates about the adequacy of totalitarianism as a theoretical category, Tismaneanu suggests, is a question about evil in politics. Rightly, he does not ask which of the two totalitarian experiments was more evil – an approach that easily degenerates into an inconclusive and at times morally repugnant wrangle about numbers. There is a crucial difference, which he acknowledges at several points in The Devil in History, between dying as a result of exclusion from society and being killed as part of a campaign of terror and being marked out for death in a campaign of unconditional extermination – as Jews were by Nazis and their local collaborators in many European countries and German-occupied Soviet Russia. Numerical comparisons pass over this vital moral distinction. While the stigma of being a former person extended throughout families, it was possible to be readmitted into society by undergoing “re-education”, becoming an informer, and generally collaborating with the regime. When Stalin engineered an artificial famine which condemned millions to starvation and consigned peoples such as the Tatars and Kalmyks to deportation and death, he did not aim at their complete annihilation. Around one in five adult males is estimated to have spent time in the Gulag, along with unnumbered children after the age of criminal responsibility was lowered (along with liability to capital punishment) to include twelve-year-olds in 1935, as well as a massive influx of “female thieves” (war widows) after 1945; but most who spent time in the camps survived to return to what passed as normal life. Though there were sections of the Gulag from which few emerged alive – such as those described by Varlam Shalamov in Kolyma Tales – there was no Soviet Treblinka.

Lenin may have held to a version of humanism, but it was one that excluded much of actually existing humankind

Tismaneanu’s account of Communist totalitarianism will be resisted by those who want to believe that it was an essentially humanistic project derailed by events – national backwardness, foreign encirclement and the like. But as he points out, the Soviet state was founded on policies which implied that some human beings were not fully human. Lenin may have held to a version of humanism, but it was one that excluded much of actually existing humankind. It was not simply because they could be expected to be hostile to the new regime that priests, merchants, members of formerly privileged classes and functionaries of the old order were deprived of civil rights. They represented a kind of humanity that had had its day. There is nothing to suggest that the Bolsheviks viewed the fate of former persons as the tragic price of revolution. Such superfluous human beings were no more than the detritus of history. If radical evil consists in denying the protection of morality to sections of humankind, the regime founded by Lenin undoubtedly qualifies.
We are left with the question why so many liberals disregard these facts. Clearly a part of the explanation lies in the utopian character of the Communist project. In politics, the other face of radical evil is an inhuman vision of radical goodness. Lenin envisioned a world without states or markets in which power relations had ceased to exist. Hitler imagined a world in which power reflected an immutable racial hierarchy. It is hard to imagine any decent human being embracing the hideous Nazi vision – a mix of the völkisch chimera of a seamless “organic” culture, fraudulent “racial science” and revolutionary anti-capitalism – but the appeal to large sections of the German people of the fantasy of a conflict-free, homogeneous society cannot be denied. Lenin’s very different view of the future was in some ways no less hideous. Authentically Marxian in its most essential features, it left no room for the diverse forms of activity that humans have devised to create meaning in their lives. Religion and the practice of science and the arts for their own sake would be left behind. The little that survived of the human inheritance would be yoked to collective welfare and communal labour. It is a horribly impoverished vision, which fortunately has no prospect of being realized.

Liberals will object that Communist and Fascist projects are inherently opposed – one emerging from Enlightenment universalism, the other from Counter-Enlightenment ideas of racial purity. There is a difference, but there are commonalities as well. If Nazism repudiated Enlightenment values of human equality and universal emancipation, the Nazi project of racial hierarchy continued some influential strands of Enlightenment thinking. Nazi “scientific racism” had precedents in the Positivist plans for a science of society grounded in physiology, and in theories of human inequality and eugenics promoted by nineteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Galton and (in more explicitly racial terms) Ernst Haeckel. Lenin’s egalitarian project also claimed a basis in science – the ersatz science of historical materialism.
There is another respect in which Communism and Fascism were alike. At one in claiming a basis in science, they were both fuelled by millenarian religion. As Bertrand Russell recognized in his neglected classic The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (published in 1920 after he had visited the Soviet Union and talked with Lenin), Bolshevism was more than a political doctrine, however radical or extreme. With all its militant secularism, the Bolshevik drive to transform society was powered by apocalyptic myths. As Tismaneanu writes, with reference to Norman Cohn’s seminal work on millenarian movements, “both Leninism and Fascism created millenarian sociological and psychological constellations. Both were militant chiliasms that energized extraordinary ardor among unconditionally committed followers”. The chiliastic character of Communism is not a novel theme, and here as elsewhere in his book, Tismaneanu fashions a powerful synthesis of existing critiques. What he does not fully explore is the function of Communism in channelling religious myth in a modern secular form – a role that goes some way to explaining its continuing attraction.
Citing Boris Souvarine, Tismaneanu praises the heterodox Marxist for his account of “the strange blending of barbarism and derailed modernity in the ideological despotism of the extreme Left and Right”. In the context of the argument of The Devil in History, however, it may be the idea of derailed modernity that is strange. Elsewhere in the book, Tismaneanu recognizes Communism and Fascism as alternative forms of development, unquestionably barbaric but still fully modern. His ambiguity on this point reflects a gap in his account of contemporary liberalism. Throughout much of his argument, he takes for granted that the recycling of religious myth as secular political doctrine that occurred in Communism does not occur in advanced liberal democracies. But Western-led policies were based on the belief that after a brief period of economic shock therapy, post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe would revert to a normal path of development and adopt liberal values – an idea with no basis in history. In Russia and much of Europe, liberal values have never been “normal”. “In the end”, Tismaneanu writes, “‘the return to Europe’ heralded in 1989 stood for ‘normalcy and the modern way of life’.” However, if post-Communist countries have returned to normal it is to a version – so far relatively mild, but real enough – of the toxic normality that prevailed in much of the continent during long stretches of the twentieth century.
The blind spot in The Devil in History is the power of myth in liberal societies. “The demise of Communism in Europe”, Tismaneanu writes, “allowed space for alternative political mythologies, which left a proliferation of fantasies of salvation.” He is referring to post-Communist countries where the Soviet collapse left a vacuum that was filled by ethnocentric nationalism and a post-Holocaust variety of anti-Semitism that demonizes Jews in countries where hardly any Jews remain. But the impact of the collapse was also felt in Western democracies, where it boosted the belief that liberal societies are the only ones that can be fully modern. Commendably, Tismaneanu refuses to play “the obsolete pseudo-Hegelian tune of the ‘ultimate liberal triumph’”. However, the issue is not whether liberalism is destined to prevail – a stale debate about historical inevitability – but whether liberal societies can escape what he aptly describes as “a contagious hubris of modernity”. For those possessed by the idea that the Communist collapse was a triumph for the only truly modern way of life – a species of eschatological myth rather than any kind of empirical observation – the question did not arise. For them, liberalism was the riddle of history solved, and knew itself to be the solution.
The same myth – a hollowed-out version of a religious belief in providence – underpins the abiding appeal of Communism. One of the features that distinguished Bolshevism from Tsarism was the insistence of Lenin and his followers on the need for a complete overhaul of society. Old-fashioned despots may modernize in piecemeal fashion if doing so seems necessary to maintain their power, but they do not aim at remaking society on a new model, still less at fashioning a new type of humanity. Communist regimes engaged in mass killing in order to achieve these transformations, and paradoxically it is this essentially totalitarian ambition that has appealed to liberals. Here as elsewhere, the commonplace distinction between utopianism and meliorism is less than fundamental. In its predominant forms, liberalism has been in recent times a version of the religion of humanity, and with rare exceptions – Russell is one of the few that come to mind – liberals have seen the Communist experiment as a hyperbolic expression of their own project of improvement; if the experiment failed, its casualties were incurred for the sake of a progressive cause. To think otherwise – to admit the possibility that the millions who were judged to be less than fully human suffered and died for nothing – would be to question the idea that history is a story of continuing human advance, which for liberals today is an article of faith. That is why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many of them continue to deny Communism’s clear affinities with Fascism. Blindness to the true nature of Communism is an inability to accept that radical evil can come from the pursuit of progress.

John Gray is Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics. His books include Black Mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia, 2007, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the strange quest to cheat death, 2011, and, most recently, The Silence of Animals: On progress and other modern myths, which is due to be published next month. 
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The Devil in History

Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century

Vladimir Tismaneanu

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The Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.

Brasil: governo continua o desmantelamento do equilibrio fiscal

Um dia, um dia, ainda vamos pagar por toda a irresponsabilidade atual do governo. A presente (mas a futura, também) geração precisa tomar consciência de que o governo está criando uma bomba relógio fiscal, que vai estourar algum dia. Difícil precisar, pois depende de outras condições da economia (arrecadação, capacidade de endividamento, disposição de particulares em financiar o governo, etc.), mas haverá um preço a pagar por toda essa gastança irresponsável.
Abaixo um post do blog do Mansueto Almeida (não é parente).
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Para onde foi a economia com os juros? para o custeio.

05/02/2013 por mansueto

Segue abaixo o editorial de ontem do jornal Valor Econômico que cita análise deste blog.
Valor Econômico – 04 de fevereiro de 2013

A economia com os juros foi usada para elevar o custeio
Ofuscada pelos truques e artifícios contábeis utilizados pelo governo para fechar suas contas no fim do ano passado, uma boa notícia na área fiscal passou despercebida: os gastos com o pagamento de juros da dívida pública caíram muito em 2012, em comparação com o ano anterior, como resultado da redução continuada da taxa Selic pelo Banco Central.
A despesa do setor público com juros diminuiu de 5,71% do Produto Interno Bruto (PIB) em 2011 para 4,85% do PIB no ano passado – uma expressiva redução de 0,86 ponto percentual do PIB ou R$ 22,8 bilhões. A economia com juros foi maior do que o gasto no ano passado com o Bolsa Família, principal programa social do governo.
Este é um fato notável. Aos poucos, em ritmo às vezes considerado lento por alguns, a taxa real de juros brasileira vai se aproximando dos padrões internacionais e o gasto do setor público com o serviço de suas dívidas vai se tornando um peso menos opressivo para os contribuintes.
É importante não esquecer que a despesa com juros chegou a superar 9% do PIB na década passada, o que colocava o Brasil como um triste caso a despertar a curiosidade das demais nações. Essa é uma distorção que começa a ser corrigida.
A queda do pagamento de juros abriu um espaço considerável nas contas públicas, mas não se refletiu no principal indicador fiscal, que é o resultado nominal – critério utilizado pelos países desenvolvidos e por quase todos os emergentes, pois considera todas as despesas, inclusive as financeiras. O déficit nominal do setor público brasileiro saiu de 2,61% do PIB em 2011 para 2,47% do PIB no ano passado – uma redução de apenas 0,14 ponto percentual do PIB.
O déficit nominal nada mais é do que a despesa com juros menos o superávit primário. Se a despesa com juros caiu muito e não houve diminuição expressiva também do déficit nominal, a explicação é que o superávit primário foi reduzido.
Dito de uma maneira mais simples: o resultado fiscal registrado em 2012 mostra que a economia feita com a redução dos pagamentos de juros foi usada pelo governo para pagar outras despesas primárias.
A meta de superávit primário do setor público para 2012 era de 3,1% do PIB. O resultado obtido foi equivalente a 2,38% do PIB, segundo informou o Banco Central na semana passada. Mas se dessa conta forem excluídos os R$ 12,4 bilhões do Fundo Soberano do Brasil (FSB) – usados para aumentar o superávit do governo federal -, o superávit efetivo ficou em 2,1% do PIB estimado para o ano passado. Ou seja, o resultado fiscal ficou um ponto percentual do PIB abaixo da meta. O superávit primário caiu porque o governo elevou as despesas primárias.
A questão agora é saber em que foi usada a economia com os juros das dívidas. O economista Mansueto Almeida, em seu blog na internet, conta que a despesa primária federal cresceu de 17,52% do PIB em 2011 para 18,24% do PIB no ano passado – uma elevação de nada menos do que 0,72 ponto percentual do PIB.
O aumento, sempre em comparação com o PIB, ocorreu, segundo o economista, nas despesas com o INSS, com gastos sociais (transferências de renda, como o programa Bolsa Família, a Lei Orgânica de Assistência Social etc.), saúde e educação e o que ele chama de custeio administrativo, onde inclui os gastos com os subsídios do Programa de Sustentação do Investimento (PSI), do programa Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) e com as despesas de passagens aéreas dos servidores, entre outros.
Os investimentos em 2012 (excluindo desse conceito as despesas com o programa Minha Casa Minha Vida, considerado gasto de custeio) caíram, segundo Mansueto, em comparação com o PIB. Em 2011, os investimentos ficaram em 1,15% do PIB e, no ano passado, em 1,09% do PIB.
Ou seja, o espaço fiscal aberto pela queda da despesa com o pagamento de juros não foi ocupado pelos investimentos em infraestrutura, tão essenciais para a retomada do desenvolvimento. O mais preocupante é que o aumento das despesas, na maioria dos casos, tem caráter permanente, o que significa que o espaço fiscal já foi definitivamente ocupado.

O novo Congresso brasileiro: pequeno retrato

Flash de um instantâneo: 

Maioria da Mesa do Senado está sob investigaçãoDos 11 integrantes do novo comando da Casa, seis respondem a inquérito ou ação penal no Supremo. Na Câmara, três dos novos membros da direção também são investigados na corte

Cotado para corregedor da Câmara também é investigadoAlém do novo 3º secretário, Maurício Quintella Lessa, o primeiro vice-presidente e um suplente da Mesa são alvos de investigação no Supremo Tribunal Federal
 
Henrique Alves tenta reverter condenação por improbidadeTribunal de Justiça do Rio Grande do Norte examina recurso do novo presidente da Câmara, condenado em primeira instância. Ele também responde em Brasília por enriquecimento ilícito 

Sem comentários (e precisa?)
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O Imperio repensa o seu exercito - Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy Situation Report
Foreign Policy February 9, 2013

FP Exclusive: Odierno says the Army must change

Whither the Army? At the end of more than a decade of two large land wars and budget cuts forcing new thinking in the military's role in the world, the Army is at a crossroads. While the much-hyped pivot to Asia seems to give the strategic nod to the Air Force and the Navy, with the small Marine Corps not far behind, the Army is now seen as having to adapt quickly to position itself for a new future. For the man who has to lead that transition, it's all about explaining what the Army does, how important decisions today will affect tomorrow, and what the service must do to change. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno is releasing his "strategic intent" this morning exclusively on FP and here in Situation Report, where he makes the case that his service is still critical, still relevant, and still necessary in an uncertain world. But he says the service must also adapt to meet an array of new challenges by making forces more scalable and investing heavily -- and earlier in their careers -- in building leaders, all while remaining accountable to the taxpayers who make the force possible.

Odierno: "To posture the force for the complexities of the strategic environment, we must simultaneously reform our processes and training to generate forces scalable from squad to corps. We cannot afford to limit our planning to brigade combat teams. Our success going forward will be built on deploying the right soldiers, with the right training, in the right size units, at the right time. Small unit leadership will be at a premium in this potential environment of dispersed, decentralized operations. In some circumstances that may require small teams of soldiers engaged in partnership activities. Others may require the combined mass of brigades, divisions, or corps. This does not necessarily suggest a smaller force, but an Army capable of deploying tailored packages to the point of need, while retaining the ability to rapidly reassemble into larger combat formations as requirements change or small conflicts expand."

On the Army of today: "[A]n objective assessment of what is required to fulfill our mission in a complex future environment against a constantly evolving range of threats demands that we continue to invest in the specific skills, equipment, and forces needed to do so effectively. This demands foresight and innovation, as well as a bottom-up engagement by our most valuable asset -- our soldiers and leaders. It also requires recognition that the Army, like our nation, must be good stewards of our resources in an era of increasing fiscal austerity."

On keeping pace with technology: "The cyber revolution has created new ways for people to connect. Information passes instantly over great distances, and entire virtual communities have been created through social media.... [M]any of our adversaries lack the ability to confront our forces physically, choosing instead to employ virtual weapons with potentially devastating effect. We must take full advantage of these technologies, building our own capabilities to operate in cyberspace with the same level of skill and confidence we enjoy on the land. We will either adapt to this reality or risk ceding the advantage to future enemies."

On equipment and the leaders it needs: "This effort requires equipment that gives our squads, as the foundation of the force, capabilities that overwhelm any potential foe, enabled by vehicles that improve mobility and lethality while retaining survivability. It needs a network that connects all our assets across the joint force together in the most austere of environments to deliver decisive results in the shortest time possible. It demands leaders with the ability to think broadly and critically, aware of the cultural lenses through which their actions will be viewed and cognizant of the potential strategic ramifications of their decisions."

The Navy's Adm. Jon Greenert wrote on FP about the Navy's pivot to Asia in November and the Marine Corps' Lt. Gen. Richard Mills wrote on FP last fall about the need for the Corps to return to the littorals for the bulk of the operations in the future.

Odierno's likely new boss will probably be confirmed by the full Senate next week, we're told. There are still a good many people who believe Chuck Hagel is the right man for the Pentagon's top job, but his showing at the confirmation hearing Thursday was roundly considered lackluster. That's why he's still working the Hill this week, visiting senators who are seen as key to getting him the 70 votes the Hagel camp wants. The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to vote Thursday, and the full Senate will take up the confirmation next week before the President's Day recess, Situation Report is told. That could put Hagel in office within a couple of weeks. Indeed, Panetta's Farewell Tour begins this week.