Sunday, November 30, 2008

When the Right Needs to Move Left

The latest issue of The American Conservative includes an excellent, short piece by Dylan Hales: Left Turn Ahead: William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko impart vital lessons for the Right. He says of Williams:

He also advocated a return to the US Articles of Confederation. Not only did he see the U.S. under the Articles as a relatively anti-imperial era, he also believed that the strong localism made possible under the Articles was the only form of governance suitable to real Americans living real lives. Williams’s belief that the Articles were “grounded in the idea and ideal of self-determined communities” is perfectly consistent both with the anti-imperial philosophy of the New Left and the Old Right’s traditional conservatism of hearth and home.

On Kolko:

Kolko’s indictment of what he calls “conservatism” is not aimed at the Southern Agrarianism of Richard Weaver or the Old Right individualism of Albert Jay Nock. In fact, Kolko’s thesis—that big government and big business consistently colluded to regulate small American artisans and farmers out of existence—has much in common with libertarian and traditionalist critiques of the corporatist state. The “national progressivism” that Kolko attacks was, in his own words, “the defense of business against the democratic ferment that was nascent in the states.” Coming of age in the ’50s and ’60s, Kolko saw firsthand the destruction of the “permanent things” as the result of the merging of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. A sense of place and rootedness lingers just beneath the surface of his work."

A proposito do BPP, BPN, etc

Henry Ford, February 11, 1934:

"Let them fail; let everybody fail! I made my fortune when I had nothing to start with, by myself and my own ideas. Let other people do the same thing. If I lose everything in the collapse of our financial structure, I will start in at the beginning and build it up again."

The Neocons Love Hillary

(via Takimag.com) Neoconservatives afraid that a President Obama might even partially live up his promise to remove troops from Iraq have been warming up to the new administration and hedging their bets where they can. Not since Operation Chaos during the primaries have we seen some Republicans so anxious to jump off the “Stop-Hillary Express” and on the Clinton bandwagon. The sort of Republican who cheers for Hillary is the same sort who embraced Lieberman. No matter how many liberal positions either held, socialized healthcare, open borders, higher taxes, anti-2nd amendment, it didn’t matter. As with Lieberman, so long as Hillary is prepared to continue sending U.S. troops around the world to continue the neoconservative mission of American global empire, Clinton would be their gal.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Tailândia (II)

Sugestão de blogue - Visto de Bangkok.

A seguir com atenção - Tailândia

O que se está a passar na Tailândia era merecedor de mais atenção do que está a receber.

Primeiro, é óptimo para baralhar a cabeça de quem ainda se lembra das aulas de história do 8º e do 11º anos: temos, de um lado, a alta burguesia e a classe média das grandes cidades numa aliança (não muito) discreta com a família real; do outro, grande parte da população rural a defender o governo eleito e a democracia parlamentar. Se D. Miguel ou o Remexido ressuscitassem em Banguecoque, eram capazes de ficar confundidos (por acaso, acho que até há um monárquico conservador português que bloga a partir da Tailândia).

Em segundo, porque tem sido dada muito pouca atenção à ideologia dos manifestantes que pretendem derrubar o governo tailandês (como se fosse apenas um movimento para derrubar o governo e realizar novas eleições) - ao que me parece, eles defendem (ou defendiam até há pouco tempo) uma mistura de reforço do poder real e daquilo que em Portugal chamaríamos "reorganização do parlamento segundo bases corporativas" (quase uma espécie de "Integralismo Siamês"...). Ou seja, parece-me estarmos em presença de algo muito raro nos dias de hoje: um movimento de massas com um programa quase abertamente anti-democrático ("quase", porque, apesar de tudo, têm democracia no seu nome, "Aliança do Povo pela Democracia").

Será que as classes dirigentes do Ocidente não se sentirão tentadas a imitar o modelo (sobretudo com a crise que vem aí)?

Monday, November 24, 2008

A relação entre o Estado e o "grande capital" - debate

Debate entre, nomeadamente, o "anarco-capitalista" Roderick Long e o "liberal" (i.e. social-democrata) Mathew Yglesias (há mais uns gajos envolvidos, mas foi esta parte que me interessou mais). O cerne da questão: Long sustenta que grande parte do poder das grandes empresas deriva, não do mercado, mas da intervenção do Estado em seu favor; Yglesias defende que o facto de haver muita intervenção estatal a favor das grandes empresas é ainda mais uma razão para defender que o Estado deve empreender politicas contrárias ao poder dessas empresas.

Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now, por Long
Politics Compromises the Libertarian Project, por Yglesias
Keeping Libertarian, Keeping Left, por Long

Pirataria

Mistério no Kosovo


A Kosovan judge has ordered three Germans suspected of throwing an explosive device at the EU headquarters in Pristina to be held for 30 days.

The three reportedly deny involvement in the attack on 14 November, saying they were detained while investigating it themselves.

(...)

German and Kosovo media report that the men are German intelligence agents but officials in Berlin refuse to comment.

(...)

The German weekly Der Spiegel said the men worked for the German intelligence agency BND, and that they told investigators they had been examining the scene of the explosion, but had not been involved in it.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Sobre o "activismo judicial" nos EUA

José Gomes André (no contexto da polémica Hamilton x Jefferson, que Aaron Burr não conseguiu encerrar) escreve:
Isto fez-me lembrar algumas coisas - primeiro, este comentário do anarquista pouco convencional Keith Preston sobre o referendo na Califórnia que suprimiu o casamento homossexual:
If so, couldn’t gay rights activists get yet another court ruling in their favor? As an unapologetic elitist who looks suspiciously upon mass democracy and mob rule (see Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Proudhon), I have no problem with judicial activism or “judge-made law” of this kind [filosoficamente, acho que esta posição até devia agradar mais aos "conservadores" do que aos "progressistas", não?]
E, sobretudo, que quando via artigos nalguns blogs liberais portugueses a criticar o "activismo judicial" nos EUA, por vezes pensava em perguntar-lhes se o "activismo judicial" que criticam não será a consequência lógica (mesmo que indesejada) da "democracia limitada" que defendem.

Diga-se que, cá por mim, até prefiro muito mais o método europeu de resolver questões fracturantes (como o aborto, o divórcio, a droga, a eutanásia, o casamento, etc.), ou seja, referendos ou decisões parlamentares, do que o método norte-americano dos tribunais.

Sugestões de Leitura

New Deal Economics e Fiscal FDR, por Paul Krugman, a defender (mais ou menos) o New Deal de Roosevelt.

A brief history of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the “Friend of Labor”, por Charles Johnson, a criticar as politicas de Roosevelt.

[Os textos não são completamente contraditórios - ambos criticam os aumentos de impostos em 1937...]

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Prémios de produtividade


Of course, there are many reasons to be disgusted with executive pay. It feels unfair that so many people make so much money managing our money, and it is often difficult to see how their talent and abilities justify their compensation. We find it particularly offensive when executives receive high bonuses after disastrous performances. But doesn’t the promise of a big bonus push people to work to the best of their ability?

To look at this question, three colleagues and I conducted an experiment. We presented 87 participants with an array of tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. We asked them, for instance, to fit pieces of metal puzzle into a plastic frame, to play a memory game that required them to reproduce a string of numbers and to throw tennis balls at a target. We promised them payment if they performed the tasks exceptionally well. About a third of the subjects were told they’d be given a small bonus, another third were promised a medium-level bonus, and the last third could earn a high bonus.

We did this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low so that we could pay people amounts that were substantial to them but still within our research budget. The lowest bonus was 50 cents — equivalent to what participants could receive for a day’s work in rural India. The middle-level bonus was $5, or about two weeks’ pay, and the highest bonus was $50, five months’ pay.

What would you expect the results to be? When we posed this question to a group of business students, they said they expected performance to improve with the amount of the reward. But this was not what we found. The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.

We replicated these results in a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where undergraduate students were offered the chance to earn a high bonus ($600) or a lower one ($60) by performing one task that called for some cognitive skill (adding numbers) and another one that required only a mechanical skill (tapping a key as fast as possible). We found that as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But when we included a task that required even rudimentary cognitive skill, the outcome was the same as in the India study: the offer of a higher bonus led to poorer performance.

(...)

When I recently presented these results to a group of banking executives, they assured me that their own work and that of their employees would not follow this pattern. (I pointed out that with the right research budget, and their participation, we could examine this assertion. They weren’t that interested.)

Re: Aristocracia Sindical


Os CTT – Correios de Portugal comunicaram hoje a cinco dos sindicatos representados na empresa que 81 dos seus dirigentes sindicais deverão voltar a apresentar-se ao trabalho, na sequência da caducidade do anterior Acordo de Empresa (AE) e da aplicação do Código do Trabalho.Numa nota divulgada hoje, os Correios explicam que a convocatória terá efeito a partir de 1 de Dezembro e que a escolha dos dirigentes sindicais (81 de um total de 103) que deverão regressar aos postos de trabalho será da responsabilidade de cada sindicato.

A empresa liderada por Estanislau Mata Costa revela ainda que a medida afecta os cinco sindicatos “com os quais não foi possível negociar um novo AE”, que substituísse o anterior, caducado a 7 de Novembro.

Quanto aos restantes nove sindicatos que assinaram o AE, os Correios explicam que “os créditos sindicais de que usufruem são regidos por esse documento assinado entre as partes, como previsto legalmente.”

A respeito disso, Vital Moreira escreve:

Agora se percebe por que é que estes sindicatos se recusaram a renegociar o antigo contrato colectivo e convocaram greves sobre greves para tentar impedir a sua caducidade, causando incontáveis prejuízos à empresa, ao público e aos próprios trabalhadores, que perderam ingloriamente os salários dos dias de greve.

Tudo para salvaguardar os inaceitáveis privilégios dos próprios dirigentes sindicais. Só estes sindicatos tinham mais de 100 dirigentes sindicais com dispensa de serviço!

O que VM escreve não me parece fazer sentido nenhum - se só os sindicatos que não assinaram o acordo perderam o crédito de horas (e se tivessem assinado o novo acordo continuariam a tê-lo), que lógica tem dizer que os sindicatos que se recuraram a negociar o contrato colectivo o fizeram para não perder as horas?

Na verdade, até faria mais sentido sugerir o oposto (o que não quer dizer que seja verdade, apenas que teria mais lógica): que os sindicatos que aceitaram o acordo o fizeram para continuar a ter os seus dirigentes com dispensa de serviço.

Sobre direitos de propriedade III: sobre o seu corpo

LrcBlog: "On a recent episode of Free Talk Live (Nov. 18, 2008) [starting at about 1:45:35, and in particular starting at about 1:55:18] one caller says he's a communist, and then struggles with whether a person owns his own body or not. He doesn't seem to realize that rights in bodies are but a type of property right and, in fact, meaningless without the right to homestead and privately own scarce resources. Indeed, as Hoppe observes:

With this justification of a property norm regarding a person's body it may seem that not much is won, as conflicts over bodies, for whose possible avoidance the nonaggression principle formulates a universally justifiable solution, make up only a small portion of all possible conflicts. However, this impression is not correct. To be sure, people do not live on air and love alone. They need a smaller or greater number of other things as well, simply to survive--and of course only he who survives can sustain an argumentation, let alone lead a comfortable life. With respect to all of these other things norms are needed, too, as it could come to conflicting evaluations regarding their use. But in fact, any other norm must be logically compatible with the nonaggression principle in order to be justified itself, and, mutatis mutandis, every norm that could be shown to be incompatible with this principle would have to be considered invalid. In addition, as the things with respect to which norms have to be formulated are scarce goods--just as a person's body is a scarce good--and as it is only necessary to formulate norms at all because goods are scarce and not because they are particular kinds of scarce goods, the specifications of the nonaggression principle, conceived of as a special property norm referring to a specific kind of good, must in fact already contain those of a general theory of property."

Monday, November 17, 2008

Questão sobre direitos de propriedade II

MM escreveu:" Vamos admitir que este cenário é verdadeiro: que as novas construções, ao reduzirem a área de infiltração de água, estão a agravar as inundações (a chuva que antes era absorvida pelos terrenos, ou se acumulava em poças, agora desce como um rio a toda a velocidade pelos arruamentos). Nessa situação (repito, assumindo que o fenómeno está efectivamente a verificar-se), poderá considerar-se que os proprietários dos terrenos recentemente urbanizados estarão a "agredir" os direitos de propriedade dos que vêm as suas casas inundadas?"

Parece-me bem que sim. As casas inundadas agora, já lá estavam antes da nova urbanização, assim tinham "ocupado" (homesteading principle de John Locke aplicado a novas realidades) não só o terreno concreto como também ocuparam a faculdade de poderem lá estar nas condições originais que foram modificadas pela acção de um terceiro que modificou com consequências as condições existentes, causando danos.

Assim, a urbanização teria que anular os efeitos da sua construção de alguma forma, para além de possível indemnização. Fosse assim feita justiça e mais cuidado se teria com as novas construções.

O problema da poluição é assim similar. Quem ocupa primeiro deve estar protegido (a qualidade do ar/etc reconhecido como fazendo parte do seu direito de propriedade) da poluição lançada sobre si posteriormente. Por outro lado, se uma dada fábrica ocupou um terreno e passou a lançar um dado grau de poluição que só afecta as redondezas constituidas por terrenos desertos e sem proprietário, essa fábrica ganhou o direito a produzir essa poluição, não podendo futuros ocupantes em terrenos adjacentes exigir direitos retroactivos... por outro talvez faça sentido poderem exigir que não possa ser lançada mais poluição do que a produzida na altura em que passam ocupar os tais terrenos adjacentes.


Para tudo isto, claro, é preciso um direito civil absolutamente eficaz, para o qual seria aconselhável a existência de tribunais arbitrais a oferecerem os seus serviços em concorrência livre de modo a possibilitar acções rápidas e se possível preventivas.

Provavelmente, o custo de tais litígios seria incluido nos seguros habituais.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

A crise da indústria automóvel nos EUA

Via Paul Krugman, Panic in Detroit, um artigo de Jonathan Cohn a defender que (na conjuntura actual) o governo dos EUA deve intervir para salvar a General Motors.

Em sentido oposto, A bailout that would be a handout, por "Angelica", contra o apoio do governo à indústria automóvel (penso que, politicamente, tanto Cohn como Angelica são "liberals", i.e., sociais-democratas)

A minha posição - absolutamente irrelevante - sobre o assunto: parecem existir bons argumentos, em termos de efeitos sobre o bem-estar social no seu todo, para justificar uma intervenção; no entanto, se uma empresa só se consegue salvar com apoio do Estado, temos ainda um melhor argumento para negar aos accionistas o direito de serem donos dessa empresa e aos gestores o direito de a gerirem; ou seja, temos um forte argumento a favor da receita "nacionalização sob controle dos próprios trabalhadores" (duvido é que, nos EUA, alguém levasse a sério uma reivindicação dessas).

Já agora, indo para o outro lado do espectro politico, no site ultra-conservador ("paleoconservative") Takimag também há alguma discussão interessante sobre o assunto (ainda que a partir de princípios filosóficos completamente distintos dos meus).

11 Novembro 1918, nascimento do nazismo

"The policies pursued by Churchill could not be further from this clear demand of jus in bello. As First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I, he supervised the British hunger blockade of Germany. By endeavoring to starve the German population, Churchill hoped to undermine the German war machine from within.

"The British blockade," Churchill later wrote, "treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress, and avowedly sought to starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission." (p. 2)

The armistice of November 11, 1918 did not bring the blockade to an end. Churchill continued it until the Germans signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. He said on March 3, 1919,

"We are enforcing the blockade with rigour… It is repugnant to the British nation to use this weapon of starvation, which falls mainly on the women and children, upon the old and the weak and the poor, after all the fighting has stopped, one moment longer than is necessary to secure the just terms for which we have fought." (pp. 5–6)

Such inhumanity has not even the excuse of military necessity. Had the Germans refused to sign, they would have been helpless against an English and French attempt to compel them to do so.

Baker does not mention this, but the young generation that grew up under these dire conditions had a strong affinity for Nazism. The UCLA historian Peter Loewenberg, in his important article, "Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort" (American Historical Review, December 1971, pp. 1457–1502) has documented this to the hilt. Churchill's policy thus helped to bring about the Nazi regime he later determined to destroy. (Unfortunately, Loewenberg characteristically includes in the piece substantial psychobabble as well, but the interested reader can readily disregard it).[1]

Churchill might have said of the laws of war what Jonathan Swift said of promises, that, along with piecrust, they are "made to be broken." Baker points out that in The Aftermath, published in 1929, Churchill said that had Germany not capitulated in 1918, a massive campaign against the German people would have brought the war to an end.

But what had happened was nothing compared to what would have happened if the Germans had kept fighting into 1919, he [Churchill] said. Poison gases of "incredible malignity" would have ended all resistance. "Thousands of aeroplanes would have shattered their cities." (p. 17)

Given this sorry record, it is hardly surprising that the renewed outbreak of world war in September 1939, which returned Churchill to the British cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, brought a new hunger blockade of Germany."

Inconvenient Facts about World War II, David Gordon [Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. By Nicholson Baker. Simon & Schuster, 2008. 566 pages.]

Anarcho-libertarianism II

"(...) This brings us to Karl's point about slaves. One of the tragic aspects of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 was that while the serfs gained their personal freedom, the land—their means of production and of life, their land was retained under the ownership of their feudal masters. The land should have gone to the serfs themselves, for under the homestead principle they had tilled the land and deserved its title. Furthermore, the serfs were entitled to a host of reparations from their masters for the centuries of oppression and exploitation. The fact that the land remained in the hands of the lords paved the way inexorably for the Bolshevik Revolution, since the revolution that had freed the serfs remained unfinished.

The same is true of the abolition of slavery in the United States. The slaves gained their freedom, it is true, but the land, the plantations that they had tilled and therefore deserved to own under the homestead principle, remained in the hands of their former masters. Furthermore, no reparations were granted the slaves for their oppression out of the hides of their masters. Hence the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day. Hence, the great importance of the shift in Negro demands from greater welfare handouts to "reparations", reparations for the years of slavery and exploitation and for the failure to grant the Negroes their land, the failure to heed the Radical abolitionist's call for "40 acres and a mule" to the former slaves. In many cases, moreover, the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed.

Alan Milchman, in the days when he was a brilliant young libertarian activist, first pointed out that libertarians had misled themselves by making their main dichotomy "government" vs. "private" with the former bad and the latter good. Government, he pointed out, is after all not a mystical entity but a group of individuals, "private" individuals if you will, acting in the manner of an organized criminal gang. But this means that there may also be "private" criminals as well as people directly affiliated with the government. What we libertarians object to, then, is not government per se but crime, what we object to is unjust or criminal property titles; what we are for is not "private" property per se but just, innocent, non-criminal private property. It is justice vs. injustice, innocence vs. criminality that must be our major libertarian focus."

The Libertarian Forum, June 15, 1969 [Editada por Murray N. Rothbard e Karl Hess e que com a anterior Left&Right faz nascer o movimento Libertarian]

Friday, November 14, 2008

Estudantes manipulados?

Tem havido insinuações que os actuais protestos dos estudantes estariam a ser manipulados pelos sindicatos de professores.

Efectivamente, os estundantes do secundário e dos 2º e 3º ciclo de básico (ou seja, o pessoal do 5º ao 12º ano) são famosos pela sua tendência para fazerem o que os professores lhes dizem para fazer.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Um negro a presidir a um pais europeu?

Muita gente diz coisas do género "Isto alguma vez era possível na Europa? Um negro (ou de outra minoria étnica qualquer) eleito chefe de Estado?". Este artigo de Razib lança alguma luz sobre o assunto.


The New York Times has a piece up, After Breakthrough, Europe Looks in Mirror, which quotes people who wonder when Europe will have its own colored head of state. Let's ignore for a moment that the longest serving Prime Minister in British history was 1/8 Indian; that was nearly 200 years ago and despite his known and acknowledged colored heritage Lord Liverpool was first and foremost a scion of the British nobility. These sorts of self-flagellations make no sense. The United States is about 30% non-white (many Hispanics identify as racially white, but operationally the Hispanic/Latino category is considered non-white). If Europe looks in the mirror, it sees a white person!

The 70% which is "white" in the United States includes a few percent of Middle Eastern Americans who would be considered colored in Europe (Ralph Nader is not considered colored in the United States, so I don't grant that Arabs are always considered to be non-white, it depends). So it is probably fair to say that on the order of 2 out of 3 Americans are of European white ancestry. A substantial majority, but still way less white than any European country. Additionally, non-whites have been a substantial proportion of the American population from its founding, when blacks were 20-25% of the population. The proportion declined as European immigration increased until the United States was a 90% white nation by the 1950s. I think most Americans will agree that the 1950s were the apotheosis of "white America" (even if the high tide of white supremacy was receding). Guess how white the United Kingdom is today? 92% white!. Yes, Britain today is whiter than the United States was during the 1950s. Even London is still majority white. Yes, London is 68% white. Washington D.C. is 38% non-Hispanic white. New York City, 35%. Chicago, 31% non-Hispanic white. Even Seattle is darker than London! Yeah, you read that right, Seattle is more colored than London.

The rest of Europe isn't any more colorful. Quick back of the envelope suggests that Italy is more than 95% white. Spain, more than 95% white. Sweden, well over 90% white. Germany, around 90% white (I am being very generous here with high estimates, but it is likely that well over 50% of the 19% non-Germany population in Germany are from EU or Balkan nations; ergo, white). France is a tough cookie because they don't like to collect ethnic data since all their ancestors are Gauls on a priori grounds. But, high bound estimates of Muslims suggest that around 10% of the population is of North African or West African origin which is Muslim. Add on top of that another 5% which is non-Muslim African, Vietnamese, etc., I think it is plausible to believe conservatively that France is still at least 85% white, making it the most colored country in Europe! The most colored nation in Europe is probably as white as the American state of Ohio.

(...)

Ainda os direitos de animais

A respeito da opinião do Ricardo Alves e do meu quase-conterraneo Rui Carmo de que os animais não têm direitos, eu tinha uma questão: isso é uma regra geral, quase por definição, do género "qualquer animal que não pertença à mesma espécie biológica que nós está, automaticamente, excluido do conceito de direitos" ou admitem que, caso uma dada espécie reúna umas certas condições (passe um certo "teste", por assim dizer), essa espécie possa ser também sujeito de direitos (não necessariamente os mesmos que aos humanos)? Quando digo uma dada espécie, não me estou a referir necessariamente a uma espécie existente - estou também a pensar, p.ex., nalguma espécie que fosse criada em laboratório por engenharia genética, ou que fosse descoberta nalgum vale perdido, ou nalguma expedição espacial (no caso do Ricardo, dá-me efectivamente a impressão que a opinião dele será essa, mas posso estar enganado).

Note-se, já agora, que há uma diferença entre "direitos dos animais" e "direitos de animais" - a primeira expressão parece indicar que os animais teriam direitos pela sua pertença ao Reino Animal (o que até poderia levantar alguma polémico sobre o exacto estatuto dos protozoários: são animais ou outra coisa qualquer?), a segundo indica apenas que alguns animais podem ter direitos, eventualmente diferentes de espécie para espécie (quanto mais penso no assunto, mais acho que há um forte caso para atribuir direitos ao cão-doméstico - afinal, trata-se de um animal que vive naturalmente em sociedades organizadas, com o que chamariamos "direitos e deveres", e que se relaciona com o Homem, essencialmente, transferindo para os humanos - ou para alguns humanos - as normas sociais da matilha; não anda longe daquilo que algumas pessoas falam quando dizem "para os animais terem direitos, teriam também que ter deveres").

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Lincoln by himself

* July 17, 1858: “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.”

* Aug. 21, 1858:”I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races (…) I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” And, “Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. We cannot, then, make them equals.”

* Sept. 18, 1858:”I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of white people with Negroes.”

* In his First Inaugural Lincoln promised to invade any state that failed to collect “the duties and imposts,” and he kept his promise.

* April 19, 1861: the reason Lincoln gave for his naval blockade of the Southern ports was that “the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed” in the states that had seceded.

* Congress, July 22, 1861: that the purpose of the war was not “interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states” (i.e., slavery), but to preserve the Union “with the rights of the several states unimpaired.”

* Aug. 22, 1862: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it” Fonte

Efeitos das reformas na assistência social

Resultados das reformas na assistência social dos EUA em 1996 (feitas em conjunto por Clinton e pelo Congresso republicano), tornando mais dificil receber o que talvez possa ser considerado a versão local do RSI:


GETTING poor mothers off welfare and into employment as quickly as possible seems to be a useful policy goal. But a new paper by economists Dhaval Dave, Nancy E Reichman, and Hope Corman suggests it can be short-sighted.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 limited the time mothers could spend on welfare and required some work as a condition for receiving it. The reforms were, by most measures, successful at reducing the number of women on welfare and increasing their levels of employment. The more time out of the labour market, the thinking goes, the harder it is to rejoin. Encouraging poor mothers to work should break the cycle of poverty and make them less likely to require government assistance for most of their adult lives. But on the other hand, the authors of the paper found that the reforms made adult women less likely to pursue education.

The reforms do not penalise minor (under 18) women who still attend school. Actually, the reforms encourage the younger women to finish their education. To receive some of the government funds, single, minor mothers must attend high school or some training program. The authors found this incentive decreased the teen dropout rates of the population between 9 and 13%.

By contrast, the reforms aimed at adult women, which promoted work and not training, made education less attractive. The authors found the reforms decreased the probability of adult women attending high school or college by 20 to 25%.

Monday, November 10, 2008

On War


"The philosophy of conquest that animated the Roman empire also lived in the rulers of medieval Europe. But, under feudalism, their means of warfare were strictly limited. The aggressiveness of kings was checked by their vassals, which led to the normalcy of peaceful relations among sovereign states. When feudalism fell apart, kings organized their own armies of mercenaries; a system in which financial considerations limited war. The threat of coalitions among nations against an aggressor also constrained conquest. With peace the normal condition of life, laws of the Great Society began to be codified culminating in the works of Grotius in the seventeenth century.

In this era, most people were not part of the war effort. War was fought among small armies of professional soldiers that afforded non-combatants the status of neutrals; their lives and property were sacrosanct. Limited war did not affect the daily activity of ordinary people save for the burdens of taxation, inflation, and debt which they loathed (...)

How far we are today from the rules of international law developed in the age of limited warfare! Modern war is merciless, it does not spare pregnant women or infants; it is indiscriminate killing and destroying. It does not respect the rights of neutrals. Millions are killed, enslaved, or expelled from the dwelling places in which their ancestors lived for centuries. Nobody can foretell what will happen in the next chapter of this endless struggle.... Modern civilization is a product of the philosophy of laissez faire. It cannot be preserved under the ideology of government omnipotence. Statolatry owes much to the doctrines of Hegel. However, one may pass over many of Hegel's inexcusable faults, for Hegel also coined the phrase ‘the futility of victory.' To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war." Human Action (Mises) on War

PS: Já agora, uma das razões porque os Bancos Centrais surgiram foi para possibilitarem o financiamentod as grandes guerras dos Estados Modernos. Ao destruir o padrão-ouro (roubando o ouro da população depositado nos bancos) ficaram finalmente libertos para fabricar toda a moeda necessária sem recurso a impostos. Digamos que nascem assim em absoluto Pecado Original.

O regresso da Guerra Fria?

Muita gente anda dizer que muitos apoiantes "de esquerda" de Barack Obama em breve ficarão desapontados. Talvez. Mas, em vez disso, talvez tenhamos um regresso aos tempos da "guerra fria": nessa época, a maior parte da esquerda ocidental era fortemente pró-EUA, talvez até mais que muita direita (houve até uma eleição qualquer em França em que os maoístas apoiaram De Gaulle porque Mitterrand era o "candidato dos americanos"; e, em Portugal, em assuntos como as Lajes ou as relações com os governos então "marxistas-leninistas" dos PALOPs, o PS era provavelmente mais alinhado com Washigton do que o PSD).

Assim, talvez o resultado da eleição de BO seja abrir caminho a que a "esquerda dentro do sistema" se reconcilie definitivamente com os EUA e volte a desempenhar o seu papel de "pilar atlantista"/"cão-de-fila do imperialismo" (escolher à vontade do leitor).

Re: Re: Os animais têm direitos?


Em rigor, creio que, em muitos animais sociais que vivem em conjunto com o Homem, temos efectivamente comportamentos que podem ser considerados como "respeitar os nossos direitos" - veja-se a obediência/lealdade que muitas vezes os cães dedicam aos seus donos.

Isso acontece, claro, porque, devido ao convivio desde tenra idade, esses animais transferem para os humanos (ou, pelo menos, para alguns humanos) as normas de interação social instinitivas que regulam a vida dessas espécies em estado selvagem - mas, no fundo, não é essa a essencia do conceito de "direitos", a tendência instintiva para achar que "há coisas que se devem fazer e outras que não se devem fazer"? É verdade que esta linha de raciocinio pode levar a conclusões que me custam a aceitar (nomeadamente que os cães devem ter mais direitos que os gatos), mas parece-me fazer algum sentido.


Sinceramente, não tenho muita certeza disso - afinal, pelo menos os chimpanzés são capazes (atraves do computador) de aprender algumas palavras e até de criar novas; creio que há até um caso de um chipanzé que, depois de aprender que melão era "mellon" e água "water", se referiu espontaneamente a uma melacia como sendo "mellon water". Parece-me alguma capacidade de manipular ideias.

Como já referi algures, a divisão "digital" entre animais racionais - o homo sapiens (ou será só o homo sapiens sapiens?) - e irracionais (todos os outros) parece-me um bocado artificial: afinal, em termos de capacidade intelectual, há provavelmente mais semelhança entre um gato e um humano do que entre um gato e uma anémona-do-mar; acho que faz mais sentido uma classificação "analógica", classificando os animais por graus diferentes de racionalidade, a começar na amiba (se considerarmos a amiba um animal) e a acabar no homem?

E aproveito para relembrar uma questão que pus em tempos:

Imagine-se que se descobria, algures numa floresta ou num vale perdido, uma colónia sobrevivente de Homo erectus; qual deveria ser o seu estatuto? Deveriam ter os mesmos direitos que o Homo sapiens sapiens? Deveria ser considerados "animais", como os gatos e as cabras (o H. s. sapiens também é um animal, mas pronto)? Deveriam ter um estatuto intermédio?

Nomeadamente, as pessoas que dizem que "apenas o Homem tem direitos" não costumam ser muito claros no que querem dizer com "Homem" - a familia Hominidae? o género Homo? a espécie Homo sapiens? a subespécie Homo sapiens sapiens (se considerarmos que é uma subespécie)? Claro que o facto de apenas a última existir hoje em dia evita ter que pensar no assunto.

Alegada carga policial frente à Escola C+S de Alfragide

Obama clock: Quanto tempo vai demorar até acabar com o Patriot Act?

E substitui-lo por outro?

Sunday, November 09, 2008

A América de uns e outros

Henrique Raposo foi agora para o Expresso dar as suas escolhas: Hamilton (ainda a Revolução separatista tinha acabado de assentar e já tentava estabelecer um Banco Central e uma economia mercantilista) e Lincoln (um advogado dos grandes negócios - - hipócrita que enchia os discursos de "Deus" e que se pensa que nunca tenha entrado numa Igreja). E quem é que estava errado? Thomas Jefferson. As americanófilos de hoje o que gosta é do "processo político" (democracia que não existe em nenhum documento) e do Estado Federal americano, os porta-aviões , os bombardeamentos por uma boa causa, os bailouts à banca e indústria . Aquela América que Jefferson desprezaria.

PS: por curiosidade a expressão "Independent States" aparece 3 vezes na declaração de independência, não "Independent State". A declaração por sinal, não é um mero documento histórico, ainda faz parte do aparato legal-constitucional.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Sarah Palin e Africa

Está toda a gente a dizer que Sarah Palin não sabia que África é um continente. Há alguma prova disso ou há apenas um testemunho em segunda mão de um jornalista que diz ter falado com elementos não identificados da campanha de McCain que terão dito que ela não sabia que Africa era um continente?

Thursday, November 06, 2008

A possivel "administração Obama"

Below is a brief summary of Obama’s potential choices for a few key roles in his administration.

Chief of Staff

Obama’s key White House position will go to Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois. While Emanuel knows his way around the corridors of Washington, qualifying him in the traditional sense, this alone doesn’t mean he’s the guy you want drawing up Obama’s policy papers day after day.

For starters, Emanuel is a shameless neoliberal with close ties to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), even co-authoring a strategy book with DLC president Bruce Reed. Without Emanuel, Bill Clinton would not have been able to thrust NAFTA down the throats of environmentalists and labor in the mid-1990s. Over the course of his career, Emanuel’s made it a point to cozy up to big business, making him one of the most effective corporate fundraisers in the Democratic Party. He’s also a staunch advocate of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

Emanuel’s shinning moment came in 2006 as he helped funnel money and poured ground support into the offices of dozens of conservative Democrats, expanding his party’s control of the House of Representatives. Emanuel, who supports the War on Terror, and expanding our presence in Afghanistan, worked hard to ensure that a Democratic House majority would not alter the course of US military objectives in the Middle East.

In short, Rahm Emanuel is not only a poor choice for Obama’s Chief of Staff; he’s one of the least progressive picks he could have made. While he may have decent views on abortion, tax policy, and social security, Emanuel’s broader vision is more of the same: war and corporate dominance.

Treasury Secretary

For arguably the most important position Obama will be appointing, the President-Elect may pick well-regarded economist Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Volker is one of Obama’s closest economic advisors and is thought to be the top-choice for the position of Treasury Secretary.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Volker, in an attempt to cut inflation, dramatically raised interest rates, which helped the elite maintain value in their assets but strangled the working class as credit dried up.

(...)

“[Volker] engineered a draconian shift in U.S. monetary policy. The long-standing commitment in the U.S. liberal democratic state to the principles of the New Deal, which meant broadly Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies with full employment as a key objective, was abandoned in favour of a policy designed to quell inflation no matter what the consequences might be for employment. The real rate of interest, which had often been negative during the double-digit inflationary surge of the 1970s, was rendered positive by fiat of the Federal Reserve. The nominal rate of interest was raised overnight … Thus began ‘a long deep recession that would empty factories and break unions in the U.S. and drive detour countries to the brink of insolvency, beginning a long-era of structural insolvency’ (...)”

(...)

Defense Secretary

While Obama’s choice for this important role is speculative, quite a few fingers are pointing to Richard Holbrooke.

After Gerald Ford’s loss and Jimmy Carter’s ascendance into the White House in 1976, Indonesia, which invaded East Timor and slaughtered 200,000 indigenous Timorese years earlier, requested additional arms to continue its brutal occupation, even though there was a supposed ban on arms trades to Suharto’s government. It was Carter’s appointee to the Department of State’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Richard Holbrooke, who authorized additional arms shipments to Indonesia during this supposed blockade. Many scholars have noted that this was the period when the Indonesian suppression of the Timorese reached genocidal levels.

During his testimony before Congress in February 1978, Benedict Anderson of Cornell University cited a report that proved there never was a United States arms ban, and that during the period of the alleged ban; the US initiated new offers of military weaponry to the Indonesians at Holbrooke’s request.

Over the years Holbrooke, who is philosophically aligned with Paul Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives, has worked vigorously to keep his bloody campaign silent. Holbrooke described the motivations behind his support of Indonesia’s genocidal actions:

“The situation in East Timor is one of the number of very important concerns of the United States in Indonesia. Indonesia, with a population of 150 million people, is the fifth largest nation in the world, is a moderate member of the Non-Aligned Movement, is an important oil producer — which plays a moderate role within OPEC — and occupies a strategic position astride the sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans … We highly value our cooperative relationship with Indonesia.”

Other foreign policy advisors may also include the likes of Madeline Albright, the great supporter of Iraq sanctions, which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Madeline Albright, when asked by Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes about the deaths caused by U.N. sanctions, infamously condoned the deaths. “I think this is a very hard choice,” she said. “But the price–we think the price is worth it.”

A última vez que um Democrata foi eleito

... começou com um Genocídio.

Aqui Lew Rockwell interviews Amy Sommer, co-executive producer of "Waco: The Rules of Engagement."

Aqui o documentário em duas partes que ganhou uns prémios.



Água na fervura

Os sitios onde Obama e McCain tiveram melhores resultados que Kerry e Bush, respectivamente:

Tirando a Luisiana e os casos expectáveis do Alasca e do Arizona, temos que as maiores subidas de McCain foram no que (sobretudo durante a Guerra da Secessão) poderiamos chamar "Estados fronteiriços" - isto é, estados/territórios esclavagistas que, ou não sederam (West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma), ou só sederam depois de começar a guerra (Tennesse, Arkansas), enquanto, quer no "Sul profundo", quer no resto do país, os Democratas subiram (note-se que eu não estou a dizer que este padrão se aplica a todos os "estados fronteiriços" - afinal, Virginia e Carolina do Norte, os grandes sucessos Democratas, também pertecem à categoria "Estados que só sederam depois de começar a guerra").

A explicação para isso é fácil - em termos percentuais, e olhando apenas para os eleitorado branco, os Republicanos só subiram no Sul e pouco mais. No Sul propriamente dito isso foi anulado pelo peso demográfico dos negros, mas, na zona de transição (onde havia poucas plantações, logo poucos escravos, logo poucos negros) esse efeito foi mais vísivel.

Onde eu quero chegar com isto? Que, se os Democratas obtiveram uma vitória conjuntural (não houve qualquer mudança significativa nos padrões de votação), a sua principal dificuldade estrutural (o apoio que, nas eleições nacionais, os brancos do Sul dão aos Republicanos, mesmo contra os seus interesses económicos - afinal, o Sul e a Appalachia são as regiões mais pobres dos EUA) parece que se está a reforçar.

Ou seja, parece-me que os Democratas conquistaram votos de eleitores flutuantes (que noutra eleição podem passar facilmente para os Republicanos - nomeadamente os votos que Obama obteve entre a alta burguesia), enquanto os conservadores consolidaram a sua base de apoio.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Ainda bem que...

... eu não tenho que ganhar a vida fazendo previsões eleitorais.

Não era suposto

... o presidente da Federação ter tanta importância. Seria mais para ser como o Presidente da Suiça que ninguém sabe quem é nem o que faz. Na verdade, os melhores presidentes americanos foram aqueles de que nunca se ouve falar. Já agora, para quem não sabia, originariamente e durante uns tempos, o vice-presidente era suposto ser o que ficava em segundo na escolha pelo colégio eleitoral, o que aconteceu com Jefferson que era oponente de John Adams mas tendo ficado como seu vice.

Lincoln

... teria ficado assustado com a ideia que tinha feito uma guerra onde morreram 600 000 pessoas para Henrique Raposo achar que tinha feito a Guerra-para-impedir-a-Secessão para colocar um afro-american na Presidência, porque só se fosse para o ser na Libéria (a via defendida por Lincoln). Mas enfim, HR tem como fonte Jaffa. Mais um historiador neo-con.

Entretanto na Guerra preferida de Obama

US Airstrike Kills 40 Civilians at Afghan Wedding

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Anarcho-Libertarianism

Murray N. Rothbard, 1963: "Two other points about Western imperialism: first, its rule is not nearly so liberal or benevolent as many libertarians like to believe. The only property rights respected are those of the Europeans; the natives find their best lands stolen from them by the imperialists and their labor coerced by violence into working the vast landed estates acquired by this theft.

Second, another myth holds that the "gunboat diplomacy" of the turn of the century was a heroic libertarian action in defense of the property rights of Western investors in backward countries. Aside from our above strictures against going beyond any State's monopolized land area, it is overlooked that the bulk of gunboat moves were in defense, not of private investments, but of Western holders of government bonds. The Western powers coerced the smaller governments into increasing tax aggression on their own people, in order to pay off foreign bondholders. By no stretch of the imagination was this an action on behalf of private property – quite the contrary."

Palpite

Geórgia para Obama (os meus palpites costumam sair furados).

Kennedy


Exactamente, o que é que Kennedy fez (além de, estilo James Dean, ter "morrido cedo com um cadáver bonito"*)?

Bem, iniciou o envolvimento norte-americano em larga escala no Vietname e deixou o mundo à beira da guerra nuclear (talvez só evitada graças a um obscuro oficial soviético).

Poder-se-á responder que abriu caminho ao fim da segregação racial, mas as primeiras medidas anti-segregacionistas já vinham do tempo de Eisenhower, e, à época, os Democratas eram o partido do Ku Klux Klan, logo até é possível que uma administração republicana fosse mais activa nesse aspecto; de qualquer forma, o fim da segregação deve muito mais a Martin Luther King, aos Peregrinos da Liberdade ou aos manifestantes de Selma do que a qualquer presidente, congressista ou juiz do Supremo Tribunal.

*essa expressão costuma ser atribuida a Dean; na realidade, é de John Derek (o futuro marido de Bo Derek), no filme "O Crime não Compensa" (de Nicholas Ray, o mesmo realizador de "Fúria de Viver" - a ligação deve vir daí)

Monday, November 03, 2008

My Endorsment

Igualdade de Oportunidades vs. Igualdade de Resultados

Social mobility: an uphill battle, por Chris Dillow:

Could it be that efforts to improve social mobility just don’t justify themselves in cost-benefit terms?

The fact is that if a government wants to increase equality of opportunity - to weaken the influence of family background upon people’s life chances - it must fight against one of nature’s most powerful impulses, parents’ desire to do the best for their children. Because rich parents are better able than poor ones to do this, the battle to improve social mobility is a viciously uphill one.

Just consider the policies, some of which are sketched in the Cabinet Office report, necessary to improve equality of opportunity (...).

Many of these policies are just infeasible or enormously expensive.

And what would be the benefit of them - to give a handful of ambitious poor kids (I write as one who was once one of these) the chance to scramble up the greasy pole?

Here’s my question. Wouldn’t it be better, in cost-benefit terms - for egalitarians to focus more upon reducing inequalities of outcome?

More progressive taxation, allied to an attempt to dismantle organizational hierarchies, might be far easier ways of achieving equality than costly and vain efforts to improve social mobility.

The idea that greater equality of opportunity is somehow more feasible or more desireable than greater equality of outcome is, surely, a huge error.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Estranha fotografia?


[Pelos vistos, tirada em Martinsville, Indiana]