sábado, 3 de setembro de 2011

Onze de Setembro: Perspectivas - Council on Foreign Relations (Youtube)

A special Council on Foreign Relations series that explores how 9/11 changed international relations and U.S. foreign policy:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2789361539A21C1

Dinossauros socialistas franceses (mas candidatos)

Os franceses, cela est connu, têm um problema psicológico com a globalização, ops, pardonnez-moi, com a "mondialisation".
Eles gostariam que ela fosse revertida, cela est aussi connu.
Mas isso é apenas uma enfermidade senil da decadência, e portanto pode ser ignorado.
Seria, pois os candidatos socialistas não nos deixam esquecer que eles têm todo um programa mundial de "desglobalização", esses Dom Quixotes que pretendem enfrentar os moinhos de vento do capitalismo global (americano, bien sur).
Eu já escrevi um pouco sobre isso.
Aliás, meu último (ops, último não, mais recente) livro publicado faz até uma homenagem a um francês globalizador e visionário, o abade Raynal.
Mas isso foi antigamente, no século 18, quando os franceses estavam ajudando a descobrir as novas fronteiras do mundo global.
Depois disso eles decaíram e passaram a lutar contra o mundo. Eles e outros decadentes aqui mesmo, na América Latina, vivem propondo programas idiotas de luta contra o império americano: temos vários, aqui e na região.
São os mesmos que ficam "indignados"nas ruas e praças e que acham que os orçamentos públicos têm de ser suficientemente elásticos para abrigar saúde e educação totalmente, gratuitas, aposentadorias generosas aos 60 anos e outras bondades do gênero. Enfin, passons...
Meu livro que presta homenagem ao abade Raynal, um francês lúcido e globalizador, é este aqui:

Globalizando: ensaios sobre a globalização e a antiglobalização
(Rio de Janeiro: Lumen Juris, 2011)

Mais informações aqui: http://www.pralmeida.org/01Livros/2FramesBooks/107Globalizando.html
Vocês podem ler meu Prefácio-homenagem:
http://www.pralmeida.org/05DocsPRA/2130GlobalizandoExped.pdf

Bem, a Economist, que sempre foi irônica, se torna ainda mais irônica quando se trata de socialistas franceses. Mas, o que a revista pode fazer se eles são dinossauros de verdade?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Charlemagne

Among the dinosaurs

France’s Socialists have yet to come to terms with the modern world

Aug 27th 2011 | from the print edition

BLISS is it in a financial crisis to be a socialist. Or so it ought to be. In speculators and ratings agencies, Europe’s left has a ready cast of villains and rogues. In simmering social discontent, it has an energising force. A recent issue of Paris-Match inadvertently captured the mood: page after full-colour page on Britain’s rioting underclass were followed by gory visual detail of the bling yachts crowding into the bay near Saint-Tropez. Time, surely, to put social inclusion before defiant decadence.

The oddity is that almost everywhere the European left is in decline. Among the large countries, Socialist parties rule only in Spain, where they look likely to lose November’s election. The only big place where the left has a good chance of returning to power is France, at next spring’s presidential election. Yet France’s Socialist Party also stands out as Europe’s most unreconstructed. Hence the contorted spectacle of a party preparing for power at a time when the markets are challenging its every orthodoxy.

For a hint of French Socialist thinking, consider recent comments from some of the candidates who will contest a primary vote in October. Ségolène Royal, who lost the 2007 presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy, argued this week that stock options and speculation on sovereign debt should be banned. Denouncing “anarchic globalisation”, she called for human values to be imposed on financial ones, as a means of “carrying on the torch of a great country, France, which gave the world revolutionary principles about the emancipation of the people.”

Ms Royal, believe it or not, is considered a moderate. To her left, Arnaud Montebourg, a younger, outwardly sensible sort, argues for “deglobalisation”. He wants to forbid banks from “speculating with clients’ deposits”, and to abolish ratings agencies. Financial markets want “to turn us into their poodle”, he lamented at a weekend fete in a bucolic village, celebrating the joys of la France profonde with copious bottles of burgundy. No one seems to have told him that there is a simple way to avoid the wrath of bond markets: balance your books and don’t borrow.

Next to such patent nonsense, promises by the two front-running candidates, Martine Aubry and François Hollande, seem merely frozen in time, circa 1981. They want to return to retirement at the age of 60 (it has just been raised to 62), and to invent 300,000 public-sector youth jobs. Each supports Mr Sarkozy’s deficit-reduction targets, but refuses to approve his plan to write a deficit rule into the constitution. More taxes, not less spending, is their underlying creed.

The party is not out of tune with public opinion. The French are almost uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them one of the world’s richest people. Fully 57% say France should single-handedly erect higher customs barriers. The same share judge that freer trade with India and China, whose consumers snap up French silk scarves and finely stitched leather handbags, has been “bad” for France. The right has held the presidency since 1995 partly by pandering to such sentiments.

The causes of French left-wingery are various, but a potent one is the lingering hold of Marxist thinking. Post-war politics on the left was for decades dominated by the Communist Party, which regularly scooped up a quarter of the votes. In the 1950s many intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, clung to pro-Soviet idealism even after the evils of Stalinism emerged. Others toyed with Trotskyism well into the 1970s. François Mitterrand, who mentored Ms Royal, Ms Aubry and Mr Hollande, was swept to the presidency in 1981 by offering a socialist Utopia as a third way between “the capitalist society which enslaves people” and the “communist society which stifles them”.

Given such a tradition, it is possible that today’s Socialist leaders believe what they say. At any rate, there is a debate to be had about the right amount of market regulation and fiscal consolidation. Yet the problem with their promises is this: for every bit of conviction, there is a shameful share of pure posturing.

In truth, France’s Socialists have often had to be pragmatic in power. As prime minister between 1997 and 2002 Lionel Jospin, himself an ex-Trotskyist, privatised more assets than any of his right-wing predecessors. Even Mitterrand was forced to abandon nationalisation and embrace austerity. Should the Socialists win in 2012, it would take them “about a month, or maybe a week” to confess that they “have no choice but to keep the deficit under control”, says one well-placed party figure. Retirement at 60? Nice idea but, quel dommage, we can’t afford it.

Please allow us a moment of madness

All this requires heroic faith among centrists considering voting Socialist that reason will triumph over fiscal folly. Moreover, experience suggests that the Socialists, if elected, may feel compelled to introduce some signature policy as a sop to their disappointed base. Under Mitterrand, it was the wealth tax. Under Mr Jospin, it was Ms Aubry’s 35-hour working week. With France’s recovery fragile, the prospect of more such lunacy is chilling.

A further danger touches Europe, where France traditionally generates many ideas for integration. At a time when leaders are inching towards more economic co-ordination, with oversight of budgets and even tax harmonisation, a Socialist victory would put the shaping of such a project into uncertain hands.

With Dominique Strauss-Kahn out of the running there is just one French Socialist primary candidate who understands all this. Manuel Valls, a deputy and mayor with a refreshingly modern view of the left, says Socialists are not being straight by promising retirement at 60. He dares utter such truths as “we need to tell the French that the [budgetary] effort…will be as great as that achieved after Liberation”. Alas, the 49-year-old Mr Valls is considered too young to be a serious contender. The day the paleo-Socialists of the Mitterrand generation allow such figures to emerge would be the dawn of a real revolution.

Economist.com/blogs/charlemagne

China: os custos do capitalismo de Estado - The Economist

Este editorial da Economist é especialmente dirigido para aqueles -- vou evitar qualificativos, por uma vez -- que acreditam que o melhor sistema não é o capitalismo liberal (ou neoliberal, ou laissez-faire, whatever), nem o socialismo centralizado, e sim uma economia de mercado controlada, monitorada, dirigida pelo Estado, para corrigir as "falhas de mercado", a "ganância" dos especuladores, a exploração capitalista, enfim, as deficiências do capitalismo, que seriam todas pelo lado negativo, e que professores ignorantes atribuem às perversidades e contradições naturais do "modo de produção burguês", como diria Marx.

Quando eu estava na China, um ano atrás, os produtos mais vendidos em Hong Kong eram, pela ordem:
1) livros proibidos na China
2) leite em pó

Pode parecer surpreendente que leite em pó, um produto tão, digamos, anódino, pudesse figurar no topo da lista, logo depois de livros, que só deveriam interessar a minoria "minorantíssima"de intelectuais chineses que podiam viajar e se informar por trás da muralha de aço da censura chinesa. Mas isso deve fazer menos de 0,000001 da população chinesa.
Mais numerosas eram, certamente, as mães desesperadas que iam buscar em Hong Kong o leite em pó seguro para seus bebês, dado que leite em pó contaminado com substâncias químicas tinham matado alguns milhares de bebês no continente. Deve ser mesmo desesperador ter seu único filho levado embora por produtos contaminados que capitalistas gananciosos (esses, sim, merecem o nome) produziram com autorização ou sem autorização de um Estado corrupto.

Pois é, aqueles economistas (petistas ou não) que enchem a boca para falar do "capitalismo de Estado" chinês deveriam levar em conta essas realidades prosaicas, que não estão neste editorial da Economist, mas que são por mim relembradas, a título de ensinamento sobre como pode ser perverso o tal de capitalismo de Estado.
Melhor ficar com o capitalismo neoliberal dos explorados capitalistas e dos gananciosos especuladores. Esses, pelo menos, a vigilância dos consumidores e a concorrência desenfreada natural do capitalismo consegue eliminar de vez em quando. Quanto a capitalistas do Estado, se trata de uma erva daninha muito difícil de extirpar...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Government and business in China

Privatisation with Chinese characteristics

The hidden costs of state capitalism

Sep 3rd 2011 | from the print edition

AFTER a deadly high-speed train crash in Zhejiang province in July, the authorities sent bulldozers to bury the wreckage. The crash was an embarrassment; a reminder that China’s state-directed rush to modernise has involved cut corners, shoddy safety standards and a staggering amount of corruption. That contradicted the official storyline, in which China has become the world’s second-largest economy thanks to the Communist Party’s wise guidance. Rather than grapple with awkward counter-evidence, the party tried to bury it.

No wonder it is so hard to judge China’s state-led economic model. The government’s actions lie hidden beneath hundreds of tonnes of secrecy, and beyond easy measurement. But as our briefing this week makes clear, China’s semi-privatised companies are both more varied and less admirable than is popularly understood.

Under Mao, it was simple. The government controlled everything and ran it into the ground. Those days are gone. Since 1993 Beijing has encouraged gaizhi for state-owned enterprises, which means “changing the system”. Between 1995 and 2001 the number of state-owned and state-controlled enterprises fell by nearly two-thirds, from 1.2m to 468,000, and the proportion of urban workers employed in the state sector fell by nearly half, from 59% to 32%. Yetgaizhi is not simply a euphemism for “privatisation”; it has also created a variety of public-private hybrids.

At one end of the spectrum are the giant state-controlled enterprises in industries which the government considers “strategic”, such as banking, telecoms or transport. Such firms may have sold minority stakes to private investors, but they operate more or less like government ministries. Examples include China Construction Bank, a huge backer of infrastructure projects, and China Mobile, a big mobile-phone carrier.

Next come the joint ventures between private (often foreign) companies and Chinese state-backed entities. Typically, the foreign firm brings technology and its Chinese partner provides access to the Chinese market. Joint ventures are common in fields such as carmaking, logistics and agriculture.

A third group of firms appears to be fully private, in that the government owns no direct stake in them. Their bosses are not political appointees, and they are rewarded for commercial success rather than meeting political goals. But they are still subject to frequent meddling. If they are favoured, state-controlled banks will provide them with cheap loans and bureaucrats will nobble their foreign competitors. Such meddling is common in areas such as energy and the internet.

A fourth flavour of Chinese firm is fuelled by investment by local government, often through municipally owned venture-capital or private-equity funds. These funds typically back businesses that dabble in clean tech or hire locals.

These firms with their various sorts of state influence have several strengths. They invest patiently, unruffled by the short-term demands of the stockmarket. They help the government pursue its long-term goals, such as finding alternatives to fossil fuels. They build the roads, bridges, dams, ports and railways that China needs to sustain its rapid economic growth.

Crowding out the true bamboo capitalists

But statism has big costs, too. The first is corruption. When local bigwigs can award contracts to firms which they themselves control, graft spreads like bird flu. Sometimes well-connected shell firms take a fat cut and then pass the real work on to subcontractors, with scant regard for standards. The second problem is that big state-backed enterprises crowd out small entrepreneurial ones. They gobble up capital that China’s genuinely private firms could use far more efficiently, amassing bad debts that will eventually cause China big trouble. They rig the game in other ways, too, enjoying privileged access to land and permits. Small private firms are often unsure whether what they do is even legal. The rise of local-government venture funds creates yet more opportunities for abuse. Some of these funds will invest wisely, but many will pursue non-commercial goals, from job creation to crony enrichment.

None of this has stopped China from growing at a dizzying pace. But the quality of growth matters too, as the middle-class protesters in Zhejiang indicate (see article). China’s leaders should beware the hidden costs of state capitalism.

from the print edition | Leaders

Diplomatizzando

sábado, 3 de setembro de 2011

Onze de Setembro: Perspectivas - Council on Foreign Relations (Youtube)

9/11 Perspectives

Dinossauros socialistas franceses (mas candidatos)

Charlemagne

France’s Socialists have yet to come to terms with the modern world

China: os custos do capitalismo de Estado - The Economist

Government and business in China

The hidden costs of state capitalism

Postagem em destaque

Livro Marxismo e Socialismo finalmente disponível - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Academia.edu