O que é este blog?

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

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domingo, 2 de setembro de 2012

A inviabilidade do trem-bala - Marcos Cintra



article image
Projeto pretende interligar São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro (Reprodução/Internet)
TRANSPORTE

A inviabilidade do trem-bala

Dificuldade com prazo de entrega, alto custo, falta de estimativas de demanda são alguns problemas que tornam o trem-bala inviável

por Marcos Cintra

Reflexao da semana: a distancia entre a realidade e a ficcao

Mundos à parte

Com base em uma longa observação da história econômica real da América Latina e a versão que dela se fala nas Faculdades de Economia, em disciplinas como história econômica ou pensamento econômico latino-americano, cheguei à conclusão de que há uma enorme distância entre os fatos e a sua versão ficcionalizada, essa que se ensina em certas faculdades.
Antes, a bibliografia dominante era dominada por figuras como Raúl Prebisch, Aníbal Quijano, FHC (e sua famosa teoria da dependência, equivocadamente famosa nas academias americanas, e uma das idiotices latino-americanas) ou então a inefável Maria Conceição Tavares (e seus muitos pupilos, algum continuando a cometer equívocos no governo ainda hoje). 
Atualmente, quem pontifica são luminares como Bresser Pereira, Ha-Joon Chang e muitos outros, todos na beatitude dessa coisa que se chama "pensamento econômico latino-americano".
Ainda vou escrever um trabalho sobre essa enorme distância entre a realidade e os mitos, especialmente sobre a ficção do keynesianismo e suas diferenças (conceituais, materiais, de política) com os processos reais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 2 de Setembro de 2012

Capes contraria 'a revalidacao automatica de diplomas

No que faz muito bem.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

ESTABILIDADE ACADÊMICA
Por Marília Scriboni

Revista Consultor Jurídico, 4 de julho de 2012

"O Conselho Técnico-Científico da Educação Superior da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível (Capes), ligado ao Ministério da Educação, é contrário à revalidação automática de diplomas de pós-graduação obtidos no exterior. O grupo encaminhou nota técnica sobre o assunto no último 26 de maio ao ministro da Educação, Aloizio Mercadante.
Para o grupo, “a adoção desse procedimento comprometeria todo o Sistema Nacional de Pós-Graduação stricto sensu, suas exigências e resultados, bem como sua estabilidade acadêmica e científica para a formação de quadros de nível de excelência internacional.
Algumas universidades do Mercosul vêm oferecendo mestrados em áreas como Economia, Direito, Administração e Medicina em dois meses, juntamente com pacotes de férias. É esse tipo de prática que a Capes vem querendo barrar, além das diversas ações judiciais que tentam fazer a revalidação automática dos diplomas. Há, inclusive, projetos de lei no Senado e na Câmara que tentam permitir a revalidação para cursos feitos em países de língua portuguesa e membros do Mercosul. Assim, a nota serve como um ato simbólico e um aviso de que os cursos desse tipo não são aceitos no Brasil.
O documento diz que “é motivo de muita preocupação que a revalidação automática de diplomas obtidos no exterior seja adotada sem exame e comprovação do trabalho científico, tecnológico, educacional e de inovação realizado tanto pelo portador do título, como pela instituição que o titulou”.
Ainda de acordo com a nota, “a República Federativa do Brasil persegue o objetivo de excelência e reconhecimento internacionais de seu sistema de pós-graduação, o que somente se mostra possível com a definição de parâmetros aceitos pela comunidade acadêmico-científica nos âmbitos nacional e internacional”.
A Capes diz, ainda, que “inexiste exemplo de país onde a revalidação de títulos obtidos no exterior seja aplicada automaticamente por ato normativo do Poder Legislativo, sem processos ou acordos construídos pela própria comunidade científico-acadêmica”. O assunto é regulado pela Lei 9.394, de 1996, que aprovou as diretrizes e bases da educação nacional.
O artigo 48 da lei estabelece que “os diplomas de cursos superiores reconhecidos, quando registrados, terão validade nacional como prova da formação recebida por seu titular”.
Hoje, são três as possibilidades: Os diplomas expedidos pelas universidades serão por elas próprias registrados, e aqueles conferidos por instituições não-universitárias serão registrados em universidades indicadas pelo Conselho Nacional de Educação; Os diplomas de graduação expedidos por universidades estrangeiras serão revalidados por universidades públicas que tenham curso do mesmo nível e área ou equivalente, respeitando-se os acordos internacionais de reciprocidade ou equiparação e os diplomas de Mestrado e de Doutorado expedidos por universidades estrangeiras só poderão ser reconhecidos por universidades que possuam cursos de pós-graduação reconhecidos e avaliados, na mesma área de conhecimento e em nível equivalente ou superior."
Marília Scriboni é repórter da revista Consultor Jurídico.

Europa procura um novo Bismarck - Timothy Garton Ash

OPINION
Can Europe Survive the Rise of the Rest?
By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
The New York Times,  September 1, 2012
Oxford, England
WHO won the most medals at the Olympics? Europe. Who has the largest economy in the world? Europe again. And where do most people want to go on holiday? Europe, of course. On many measures of power, the European Union belongs with the United States and China in a global Big Three. Yet say that to officials in Beijing, Washington or any other world capital today and they would probably laugh out loud. As European leaders stagger into yet another round of crisis summitry, this potential superpower is widely viewed as the sick man of the developed world.
Why? The flawed design of the euro zone has made Europe’s recession more acute than America’s, and a collapse of the euro zone would drag the rest of the world economy down with it. But why haven’t Europeans shown the political will to save the euro zone by moving toward closer fiscal and political union? What happened to the forces that drove the project of European unification forward over the last 60 years? And, if those have faded, where might Europeans find new inspiration?
As I recently argued in Foreign Affairs, the five great drivers of European unification since the 1950s have now either disappeared or lost much of their energy.
First and foremost was the personal memory of war, and the mantra of “never again,” which motivated three generations of Europeans after 1945. But the last generation to have experienced World War II is passing on, and the collective memory is weak.
Second, the Soviet threat provided a powerful incentive for Western Europeans to unite during the cold war. And throughout the cold war, the United States was an active supporter of European integration, from the Marshall Plan to the diplomacy around German reunification. No longer. Try as he might, Vladimir Putin is no Joseph Stalin. And these days, the United States has other priorities.
Third, until the 1990s, the engine of European integration was the Federal Republic of Germany, with France at the steering wheel. Germans felt a powerful idealistic desire to rehabilitate themselves in the European family of nations — and had a hard national interest in doing so. For only by gaining the trust of their neighbors and international partners could they achieve German reunification. Now that national purpose has been accomplished, and European idealism has faded with the passing of the wartime generations. These days, Germany will no longer reach for its checkbook whenever Europe calls.
Fourth, the once captive nations of Eastern Europe are no longer uniformly passionate about the European Union even though their citizens have more recent memories of dictatorship, hardship and war. While Poland is one of the union’s most vigorous advocates, Hungary and the Czech Republic are now among its most skeptical and contentious members.
Finally, the widespread assumption that “Europe” would mean a rising standard of living and social security for all Europeans has been badly dented by accumulated debt, aging populations, global competition and the crisis of the euro zone. Young Greeks and Spaniards hardly see those benefits today.
Nonetheless, even in the most skeptical countries there is a basic understanding that it is better to belong to a single market of 500 million consumers, rather than depend on a domestic one of 50 million, or fewer than 10 million — the size of half the European Union’s current members.
And that is the beginning of the new case for European unification. While we Europeans should redouble our efforts to ensure that our continent does not forget its troubled past, the need for scale is the key to our shared future. The 21st-century world will be one of giants: weary old ones, like the United States and Russia, and hungry new ones, like China, India, Brazil and South Africa. You do not need to accept the most apocalyptic forecasts of European decline to acknowledge that Europe is unlikely to remain the world’s largest economy for long. In such a world, even Germany will be a small- to medium-size power.
IF Europeans are to preserve the remarkable combination of prosperity, peace, relative social security and quality of life that they have achieved over the last 60 years, they need the scale that only the European Union can provide.
In a world of giants, you had better be a giant yourself: A trade negotiation between China and the European Union is a conversation between equals; one between China and France is an unequal affair.
A decade ago, Chinese policy makers took the European Union seriously as an emerging political force, a potential new pole in a multipolar world. Today, they treat it with something close to contempt. They look to Brussels only in a few specific areas, like trade and competition policy, where the European Union really does act as one. Otherwise, they prefer to deal with individual nations, as this week’s reception in Beijing for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, made clear.
The remedy lies in Europe’s own hands. Were it to move beyond the resolution of the euro zone crisis into a closer fiscal and political union, then onto a genuinely common foreign policy, China would take it more seriously, as would America and Russia.
And Europeans should not entirely abandon the hope — faint though it looks today — that their pioneering version of peaceful integration between previously warring states could point the way for better “global governance” in response to shared threats like climate change and to the tensions that inevitably arise between rising and declining powers. For without enhanced cooperation on a global scale, the 21st-century world may come to look like the late-19th-century Europe of rivalrous great powers, writ large. At best, Europe could become not just another giant; it could offer the example of a new kind of cooperative multinational giant.
When Ms. Merkel’s 19th-century predecessor Otto von Bismarck was shown a map of Africa by an eager German colonialist, the Iron Chancellor, dismissing the strategic value of faraway colonies, replied that the only map that mattered to him lay in Europe: “France is to the left, Russia to the right, we’re in the middle — that’s my map of Africa.” Today’s Europeans need to adapt Bismarck’s wisdom, declaring “China, India and Russia are to the right, America and Brazil to the left — that’s our map of Europe.”

Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 2, 2012, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: Can Europe Survive The Rise of the Rest?

sábado, 1 de setembro de 2012

Nossos amigos dos Brics: a Russia, em dois livros

A Russia é um país complicado, é o mínimo que se pode dizer....
Dois livros contam um pouco...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida



Comrades, Gangsters, Spies




Who is America's principal geopolitical foe? When Mitt Romney suggested recently that it was Russia, he was met with howls of high-minded derision. Didn't the presumptive Republican nominee know the Cold War was over? Wasn't he aware of all the benefits the U.S. had reaped thanks to the Obama administration's "reset" of relations with Moscow?
Mr. Romney's smug critics might laugh a bit less once they read "Deception," Edward Lucas's riveting follow-up to his prescient 2008 book on Russia, "The New Cold War." Mr. Lucas, a senior editor at the Economist and its former Moscow bureau chief, understands that even if the West has ceased to think of Russia as its enemy, the reverse has never really been true, especially among those who now govern from the Kremlin.
"The New Cold War" dealt mainly with how Vladimir Putin's Russia bullies its perceived enemies, using everything from pipelines to polonium poisoning. "Deception" has a narrower focus: the regime's aggressive use of its intelligence services to achieve ends that are malign and frequently criminal.
True, most states conduct espionage, and many of them, including the United States, collect intelligence on friend and foe alike. Yet Russia is a case apart. A country that runs spies like no other is run by a spy like no other. Mr. Putin spent the formative part of his career as a KGB counterintelligence officer in East Germany. The suspiciousness, double dealing and mania for control that went with that job have become the leitmotifs of Russian policy making today.
There is also the sheer scale of Russia's intelligence apparatus. The Russian military may be a ghost of its former self, but the old KGB—now divided among the FSB (for domestic intelligence), the SVR (for foreign intelligence) and the GRU (for military intelligence)—maintains all its prestige and lavish funding. The FSB alone, Mr. Lucas reports, employs 300,000 people, a larger force by far than the U.S. Marine Corps.

Deception

By Edward Lucas
(Walker, 372 pages, $26)
Finally, there are the purposes of the regime. Russia today does not seek to install totalitarian governments the world over or imprison its people behind another Iron Curtain. Yet a state without an ideology is also one without a scruple. Possibly the most notorious recent example here is the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer who uncovered a quarter-billion-dollar tax fraud conducted by Interior Ministry officials against the Russian state. Magnitsky wound up dying a gruesome prison death in 2009 in the custody of the very officials he had publicly accused. Yet the Putin regime's response has been to put Magnitsky's bereaved mother in the dock and launch a bald-faced diplomatic campaign to protect the officials Magnitsky accused of fraud from being sanctioned abroad.
This sort of criminality also extends beyond Russia's borders. A leaked State Department cable calls Russia a "virtual mafia state" and accuses its spies of using gangsters to smuggle guns to Kurdish rebels and advanced anti-aircraft missiles into Iran. A Spanish prosecutor cited by Mr. Lucas believes that "one cannot differentiate between the activities of the [Russian] government and OC [organized crime] groups" and fears that the gangs are gaining the upper hand over the Spanish legal system.
Or consider Anna Chapman, the notorious redhead caught and deported by the U.S. in 2010 as part of a larger Russian spy ring. With her sex-bomb looks and ditzy demeanor, Ms. Chapman (née Anna Vasilyevna Kushchenko) is easy to dismiss as sheer tabloid fodder. But Mr. Lucas's careful investigative work reveals Ms. Chapman's earlier involvement in an elaborate money-laundering scheme based in the U.K. and tied to Zimbabwe.
As it is, Ms. Chapman was perhaps the least accomplished member of a ring of "illegals" who succeeded in blending into American life—the ultimate test of successful tradecraft. More dangerous were characters such as "Donald Heathfield" (real name: Andrei Bezrukov), who passed himself off as a Massachusetts management consultant and sought to befriend such well-connected figures as Leon Fuerth, the former national security adviser to Al Gore.
That relationship never quite took, but the ingratiating Mr. Heathfield might have yet succeeded with other figures of influence had he not been unmasked. Far more damaging was the Estonian Herman Simm, who rose to top positions within his country's security apparatus and then within NATO before he was caught spying for Moscow in 2008. The information he passed along remains a closely guarded secret, but his story suggests how deeply Russia has been able to penetrate Western security establishments.
Mr. Lucas's account of his jailhouse interview with Mr. Simm is one of the highlights of "Deception," as is his meticulous reconstruction of the way the SVR recruited, ran and ultimately abandoned the Estonian. One depressing conclusion from reading "Deception" is that Russians are much better than their Western counterparts at the spy business. Another is that, even now, the West doesn't much seem to care that its secrets are being pilfered by a regime that wishes us ill.
"Chinese spies seem to attract more attention than Russian ones," Mr. Lucas writes. "Admittedly, Beijing's agencies have formidable hackers and are good at stealing military and technological secrets. But they do not murder people, rig our decision-making, or disrupt our alliances." Anyone who imagines that Mr. Obama's "reset" has done much to change that picture should read this sobering book.
Mr. Stephens writes Global View, the Journal's foreign-affairs column.
A version of this article appeared July 26, 2012, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Comrades, Gangsters, Spies.
==========


Freedom Unleashed

Delight and despair jostle in the mind when reading Leon Aron's masterly survey of the greatest period of Russian-language journalism—the heady years between the birth of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) policy in 1987 and the death of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The delight is in the intoxicating evocation of freedom unleashed. For this writer, who was there, the pleasure is particularly sharp because the book stirs many fond memories. In the words of Alexander Yakovlev, a leading reformer, it was a time when people "tore off the rusted locks of bolshevism and let truth out of an iron cage." Those who had been muzzled and misinformed for decades could suddenly find the truth and speak it.
The despair lies in what came before and afterward. The stories unearthed were of mass murder, colossal waste, vile prejudice and grotesque dishonesty. Many of those wrongs were exposed but not righted. And after 1991 the yearnings for truth and liberty fizzled away in the messy, greedy politics of the Boris Yeltsin years, and the crony capitalism of Vladimir Putin and his sinister friends that followed.
Mr. Aron is a distinguished scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a skillful polemicist. He brings this history of Russian journalism to life with a fine attention to detail and a bold narrative sweep. He and his researchers have read a colossal amount of newspapers and magazines from those years, and filleted them for the most telling phrases, anecdotes and arguments.
The title of "Roads to the Temple" alludes to movie scene that Mr. Aron describes in his introduction: In director Tengiz Abuladze's "magnificent anti-Stalinist saga" made in 1987, a work that "heralded glasnost," the final scene shows an older woman asking a passerby which street leads to a temple or church. The stranger says: "Not this one." The woman replies: "What's the use of a street if it does not lead to the temple?"

Roads to the Temple

By Leon Aron
(Yale, 483 pages, $40)
Mr. Aron notes: "All great revolutions begin with the search for streets, or roads, to the 'temple'—a kingdom of dignity, justice, goodness, fairness, equality, freedom, brotherhood." Russians began that search as the Soviet Union crumbled. Reporters fanned out across the nation, bringing back stories that exploded myths long promoted by Moscow—like the "golden childhood" supposedly enjoyed by every Soviet youth. The media told of children as young as 10 forced to work in fields for 12 hours a day; in 1986, there were "35,000 labor accidents involving children under fourteen." News stories showed harrowing conditions in orphanages. Soviet medicine was revealed as a disaster. A doctor "cried out" to a Pravda interviewer in 1987 about the lack of ultrasound equipment, shortages that led to the deaths of countless babies: "Not a single Soviet-made [ultrasound] machine in thirty years! In the era of space exploration!"
The greatest target was Stalinism—a taboo subject since the failed Khrushchev thaw of the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Even if the Soviet Union had been an economic, cultural and social success story, it could scarcely have survived the revelation that it was based on the murder by shooting and starvation of millions of innocent people, and the enslavement of tens of millions. As Mr. Aron recounts, secret archives were opened and firsthand accounts by former prisoners were aired. "In the November 27, 1988, issue of Moskovskie novosti . . . Marxist historian and former dissident Roy Medvedev for the first time in the Soviet press" estimated the number of arrested, imprisoned or executed under Stalin before 1937—"no less than" 10 million died.
Mr. Aron also captures well the sensational 1989 revelation of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact of 1939. The public emergence of the pact's details destroyed the great myth of Soviet wartime history: that Stalin's deal with Hitler was a wise tactical ruse to buy time for the Soviet war machine, when in truth it was a sincere and disastrous miscalculation. The valor of the Soviet Union's soldiers was the only aspect of the war, Mr. Aron says, that did not come "under assault by the glasnost mythslayers."
On top of all the historical truth-telling came public soul-searching about the corrosive effects of the modern Soviet system on morals and behavior. As Maya Ganina wrote inLiteraturnaya gazeta in 1988: "Let's find out at what point in our lives bribery, thievery, lies, humiliation of the powerless and servility towards the powers that be have become more than just a deviation from the norm."
Mr. Aron writes: "The most urgent concern was not the economy itself but rather what it did to the men and women who worked in it: their ideas, their views of themselves, their conscience—their 'souls.' Surrounded by waste and negligence, poverty and neglect, arbitrariness and incompetence of all-powerful bureaucracies implementing myriad irrational laws and regulation, men and women were found to have lost much of what was needed to make their country free and prosperous."
And so it proved. The journalists and commentators in the 1990s soon concluded that the country needed four huge changes, which Mr. Aron renders as debolshevization, privatization, deimperialization and demilitarization. But diagnosing the problem is not the same as curing it. Two decades later, Russia is plagued by much the same woes: arbitrary power, feeble property rights, a desire to bully its old empire, and a top-heavy and expensive military. And the Russian media today live with the sobering knowledge that several crusading reporters have been murdered in crimes that remain unsolved. Though far freer than it was in the Soviet ice age, Russian journalism lacks the sparkle, passion and integrity that it displayed in the vibrant era that Mr. Aron describes so well.
Mr. Lucas, international editor of the Economist, is the author, most recently, of "Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today" (Walker & Co).
A version of this article appeared July 3, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Freedom Unleashed.

A frase da semana: Ludwig von Mises

True, governments can reduce the rate of interest in the short run. They can issue additional paper money. They can open the way to credit expansion by the banks. They can thus create an artificial boom and the appearance of prosperity. But such a boom is bound to collapse soon or late and to bring about a depression.

Ludwig Von Mises 

recolhida de um dos muitos comentários a este artigo de opinião publicado no Wall Street Journal deste sábado: 


The Federal Reserve: From Central Bank to Central Planner

John Cochrane

The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2012

Os Trapalhoes Radioativos (imperialistas, claro...)

Pode ser que o atual governo do Estado Plurinacional (e outros pluris) da Bolívia pense que os governos imperialistas do Brasil e dos EUA, mancomunados (nessa ordem ou em outra) estavam contrabandeando urânio radioativo (sic) para o Chile, e escolheram depositar nas imediações das duas embaixadas em La Paz (talvez para tomar um ar fresco, no meio do caminho), antes de entregar a seu muito suspeito vizinho (sim o mesmo que tomou territórios bolivianos um século atrás e que agora impede o acesso ao mar de sua gloriosa Marinha).
Bem, vamos esperar as investigações cuidadosas da polícia plurinacional....
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
PS.: Grato ao leitor Mello por ter me enviado esta matéria; eu tinha lido algo a respeito anteriormente, envolvendo talvez uma exportação ao Irã, mas achei tão maluca a história que resolvi deixar para trás. Nunca se pode subestimar a capacidade de certos trapalhões de fazer história.

Duas toneladas de urânio são encontradas perto da embaixada do Brasil em La Paz

AFPEm La Paz
O governo da Bolívia informou ter encontrado nesta terça-feira (28) "cerca de duas toneladas de urânio" em um prédio no coração de La Paz, a poucos metros das embaixadas de Brasil e Estados Unidos, e ordenou uma investigação imediata.
Foto 65 de 66 - Policiais bolivianos guardam caminhão contendo urânio encontrado escondido dentro de um apartamento no centro de La Paz, capital da Bolívia. Segundo um porta-voz local, foram descobertas duas toneladas do minério estocadas de forma ilegal. As autoridades não divulgaram a origem ou o destino do urânio Reuters
"São cerca de duas toneladas de material que se usa para a construção de armamento nuclear", disse em entrevista coletiva o vice-ministro do Interior, Jorge Pérez, que dirigiu a operação policial para remover o material "radioativo".
"A informação preliminar aponta para um alto nível de radioatividade, o que vamos determinar com a perícia que se realizará imediatamente", disse Pérez, revelando que o suposto dono do material "foi detido".
O vice-ministro não detalhou como o material foi localizado e para onde a polícia o levou, e se a operação ocorreu com as devidas medidas de segurança radioativa. Também não informou se os vizinhos do local precisarão realizar exames médicos.
O material estava em uma garagem do primeiro andar de um prédio no coração de La Paz, a poucos metros das embaixadas de Brasil e Estados Unidos.
"Nos chama a atenção o manejo de um material deste tipo, prejudicial à saúde, em tal quantidade e no centro da cidade de La Paz", disse Pérez.
As duas toneladas de urânio estavam "em bolsas (plásticas) expostas ao tempo, um material radioativo manipulado de maneira direta e de forma irresponsável, arriscando a vida de pessoas", prosseguiu o funcionário.
Segundo Pérez, o urânio "pode proceder do Brasil ou de outro país vizinho, e provavelmente seguiria para o Chile"