After Neoconservatism
By Francis Fukuyama
The New York Times, February 19, 2006
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?ex=1142139600&en=70a46430e2f789d2&ei=5070
As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.
But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.
The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives - red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East - supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.
More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.
The Neoconservative Legacy
How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.
The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering - which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare - suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.
In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.
It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.
If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.
How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.
Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.
And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.
The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."
This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.
By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.
I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern - that is, technologically advanced and prosperous - society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony
The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." (Italics added.)
It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them.
There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.
Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.
Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.
The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.
What to Do
Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.
The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.
The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.
The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.
We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and - yes, unfortunately - terrorism.
But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.
If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.
The Bush administration has been walking - indeed, sprinting - away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.
Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world - ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.
Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book America at the Crossroads, which will be published this month by Yale University Press.
sexta-feira, março 10, 2006
56) Os "neocons" na defensiva...
Jornal Valor Econômico - 10.3.06 - pág. A15
Grupo que defendeu a invasão do Iraque errou ao acreditar que todos os países são iguais
Por Jacob Weisberg, colunista do Financial Times
Em meio ao agravamento persistente da situação no Iraque sob a ocupação americana - a questão agora é se é possível evitar uma guerra civil - o exame de como entramos nessa confusão é cada vez mais premente. Diversos históricos instantâneos e relatos de bastidores do processo de tomada de decisões do governo Bush já foram publicados. Mas é um livro que não contém quaisquer relatos inéditos o que melhor conseguiu explicar por que o desastre desenrolou-se da maneira que conhecemos. "America at the Crossroads" ("EUA na Encruzilhada"), de Francis Fukuyama, argumenta que os americanos cometeram o erro de ir ao Iraque sem preparar-se para uma ocupação hostil por causa da errônea linha de pensamento de política externa de um pequeno grupo de pessoas denominadas neoconservadoras.
"Neoconservador" tornou-se um termo de tal carga emocional que tende a obliterar qualquer discussão civilizada. Alguns europeus o empregam como sinônimo de defensores da guerra no Iraque ou para designar belicistas sofisticados em geral. Nas extremas esquerda e direita americanas, "neocon" freqüentemente ressalta a identidade judaica de muitos de seus adeptos, sugerindo que eles se importam mais com Israel do que com os EUA. Fukuyama, que até recentemente incluía-se entre os neoconservadores, define o termo não pela história compartilhada de seus membros, mas por seu conjunto de idéias compartilhado.
Embora haja infinitas exceções, os "neocons" mais influentes são "wilsonianos linha-dura" com relação à política externa. Eles rejeitam a noção realista, mais fortemente identificada com Henry Kissinger, segundo a qual os EUA deveriam agir apenas segundo seus interesses. Em vez disso, os "neocons" acreditam que os EUA devem oferecer ao mundo sua liderança moral, disseminando liberdade e idéias democráticas - pela força, se necessário. Eles acreditam no valor das alianças, mas não dão bola para instituições mundiais ou para as minúcias da legislação internacional. Segundo essa caracterização, Fukuyama inclui entre os "neocons" tanto Ronald Reagan como o George W. Bush do segundo mandato, alguém tão distante quanto seria possível imaginar de um intelectual judaico.
Embora continue simpático à missão de disseminação da democracia, Fukuyama critica as inflexões unilaterais e militaristas que produziram conceitos como os de "guerra preventiva" e "mudança de regime". Os "neocons", argumenta ele, abandonaram sua idéia política fundamental, isto é, de que esquemas ambiciosos para remodelar sociedades são fadados ao fracasso e produzem conseqüências não pretendidas. "Oposição à engenharia social utópica", escreve Fukuyama, "é o mais inabalável fundamento de todo o movimento". No entanto, os "neocons" estão hoje atolados numa tentativa de transformar um semipaís mal compreendido, catastroficamente destruído e de realidade profundamente diferente no Oriente Médio. Como foi que essas pessoas inteligentes desviaram tanto do curso? Embora Fukuyama não faça tal comparação, o fracasso deles lembra cada vez mais o dos arquitetos da guerra no Vietnã.
No primeiro ato da tragédia neoconservadora, um movimento intelectual surge, no início da década de 60, animado pela equivocada expansão do Estado de bem-estar social americano por Lyndon B. Johnson. Aplicando uma versão de sua crítica ao totalitarismo comunista ao liberalismo da "grande sociedade", as primeiras figuras chave do movimento, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer e Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argumentam que boas intenções estão encalhando nas águas rasas da humanidade recalcitrante e na ignorância sobre as realidades da pobreza. O que diferencia esses autores de seus colegas liberais de pensamento mais convencional é um agudo ceticismo sobre a possibilidade de transformação social e arguto empirismo sobre pessoas, programas e resultados.
No segundo ato, no fim da década de 70, um elenco um pouco diferente dos "neocons" aplica à política externa americana a mesma idéia da era da détente. Aqui, há cenas de hostilidade à ONU e de enfrentamentos com o realismo de Kissinger, que eles consideram excessivamente tolerante com o comunismo. Mais uma vez, eles parecem, em retrospecto, premonitórios.
É apenas no terceiro ato que os neoconservadores dão com os burros catastroficamente n'água. Imbuídos, pelas revoluções em 1989, de um senso de seu próprio acerto e do predomínio incontestado dos EUA, os "neocons" passam a imaginar que até mesmo sociedades atrasadas, não ocidentais e desprovidas de tradições liberais são capazes de trilhar um caminho pós-totalitário polonês. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle e William Kristol fantasiam que uma dúbia figura garibaldiana, Ahmed Chalabi, é capaz de derrubar o ditador mais perverso do mundo com um pequeno bando de seguidores. Depois que isso se revelou inútil, eles convencem o vice-presidente e o secretário de Defesa dos EUA - e em última instância, o próprio presidente - de que, depois que os militares americanos terminarem o trabalho, os iraquianos abraçarão as forças de ocupação em seu país. Ao vencer essa batalha, clímax dessa trama, os "neocons" esquecem-se de quem são. Suas duas melhores qualidades - ceticismo em face de mudanças comandadas por governos e empirismo sociológico - perderam-se ao longo do caminho. Fukuyama é particularmente crítico quando discute o fermento intelectual, no curso do últimos 15 anos, em torno da questão de como são realizadas transições democráticas. Os "neocons" destacados que apoiaram a guerra permaneceram, de modo geral, fora desse debate, e é difícil "encontrar grandes discussões sobre a mecânica concreta de como os EUA estimulariam instituições democráticas ou desenvolvimento econômico", escreve ele.
Nas tragédias gregas, a queda do herói é freqüentemente plotada em termos de sua "hamartia"- "erro trágico" do herói que redunda em catástrofe. O que em última instância lançou os "neocons" em desgraça pode ter sido um gosto residual pelo pensamento categórico marxista-hegeliano. Pessoas que deveriam ser mais esclarecidas passaram a acreditar que qualquer país é igual a outro e que a inevitabilidade histórica faria o trabalho braçal por eles. Agora, a tragédia neoconservadora é também nossa.
Grupo que defendeu a invasão do Iraque errou ao acreditar que todos os países são iguais
Por Jacob Weisberg, colunista do Financial Times
Em meio ao agravamento persistente da situação no Iraque sob a ocupação americana - a questão agora é se é possível evitar uma guerra civil - o exame de como entramos nessa confusão é cada vez mais premente. Diversos históricos instantâneos e relatos de bastidores do processo de tomada de decisões do governo Bush já foram publicados. Mas é um livro que não contém quaisquer relatos inéditos o que melhor conseguiu explicar por que o desastre desenrolou-se da maneira que conhecemos. "America at the Crossroads" ("EUA na Encruzilhada"), de Francis Fukuyama, argumenta que os americanos cometeram o erro de ir ao Iraque sem preparar-se para uma ocupação hostil por causa da errônea linha de pensamento de política externa de um pequeno grupo de pessoas denominadas neoconservadoras.
"Neoconservador" tornou-se um termo de tal carga emocional que tende a obliterar qualquer discussão civilizada. Alguns europeus o empregam como sinônimo de defensores da guerra no Iraque ou para designar belicistas sofisticados em geral. Nas extremas esquerda e direita americanas, "neocon" freqüentemente ressalta a identidade judaica de muitos de seus adeptos, sugerindo que eles se importam mais com Israel do que com os EUA. Fukuyama, que até recentemente incluía-se entre os neoconservadores, define o termo não pela história compartilhada de seus membros, mas por seu conjunto de idéias compartilhado.
Embora haja infinitas exceções, os "neocons" mais influentes são "wilsonianos linha-dura" com relação à política externa. Eles rejeitam a noção realista, mais fortemente identificada com Henry Kissinger, segundo a qual os EUA deveriam agir apenas segundo seus interesses. Em vez disso, os "neocons" acreditam que os EUA devem oferecer ao mundo sua liderança moral, disseminando liberdade e idéias democráticas - pela força, se necessário. Eles acreditam no valor das alianças, mas não dão bola para instituições mundiais ou para as minúcias da legislação internacional. Segundo essa caracterização, Fukuyama inclui entre os "neocons" tanto Ronald Reagan como o George W. Bush do segundo mandato, alguém tão distante quanto seria possível imaginar de um intelectual judaico.
Embora continue simpático à missão de disseminação da democracia, Fukuyama critica as inflexões unilaterais e militaristas que produziram conceitos como os de "guerra preventiva" e "mudança de regime". Os "neocons", argumenta ele, abandonaram sua idéia política fundamental, isto é, de que esquemas ambiciosos para remodelar sociedades são fadados ao fracasso e produzem conseqüências não pretendidas. "Oposição à engenharia social utópica", escreve Fukuyama, "é o mais inabalável fundamento de todo o movimento". No entanto, os "neocons" estão hoje atolados numa tentativa de transformar um semipaís mal compreendido, catastroficamente destruído e de realidade profundamente diferente no Oriente Médio. Como foi que essas pessoas inteligentes desviaram tanto do curso? Embora Fukuyama não faça tal comparação, o fracasso deles lembra cada vez mais o dos arquitetos da guerra no Vietnã.
No primeiro ato da tragédia neoconservadora, um movimento intelectual surge, no início da década de 60, animado pela equivocada expansão do Estado de bem-estar social americano por Lyndon B. Johnson. Aplicando uma versão de sua crítica ao totalitarismo comunista ao liberalismo da "grande sociedade", as primeiras figuras chave do movimento, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer e Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argumentam que boas intenções estão encalhando nas águas rasas da humanidade recalcitrante e na ignorância sobre as realidades da pobreza. O que diferencia esses autores de seus colegas liberais de pensamento mais convencional é um agudo ceticismo sobre a possibilidade de transformação social e arguto empirismo sobre pessoas, programas e resultados.
No segundo ato, no fim da década de 70, um elenco um pouco diferente dos "neocons" aplica à política externa americana a mesma idéia da era da détente. Aqui, há cenas de hostilidade à ONU e de enfrentamentos com o realismo de Kissinger, que eles consideram excessivamente tolerante com o comunismo. Mais uma vez, eles parecem, em retrospecto, premonitórios.
É apenas no terceiro ato que os neoconservadores dão com os burros catastroficamente n'água. Imbuídos, pelas revoluções em 1989, de um senso de seu próprio acerto e do predomínio incontestado dos EUA, os "neocons" passam a imaginar que até mesmo sociedades atrasadas, não ocidentais e desprovidas de tradições liberais são capazes de trilhar um caminho pós-totalitário polonês. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle e William Kristol fantasiam que uma dúbia figura garibaldiana, Ahmed Chalabi, é capaz de derrubar o ditador mais perverso do mundo com um pequeno bando de seguidores. Depois que isso se revelou inútil, eles convencem o vice-presidente e o secretário de Defesa dos EUA - e em última instância, o próprio presidente - de que, depois que os militares americanos terminarem o trabalho, os iraquianos abraçarão as forças de ocupação em seu país. Ao vencer essa batalha, clímax dessa trama, os "neocons" esquecem-se de quem são. Suas duas melhores qualidades - ceticismo em face de mudanças comandadas por governos e empirismo sociológico - perderam-se ao longo do caminho. Fukuyama é particularmente crítico quando discute o fermento intelectual, no curso do últimos 15 anos, em torno da questão de como são realizadas transições democráticas. Os "neocons" destacados que apoiaram a guerra permaneceram, de modo geral, fora desse debate, e é difícil "encontrar grandes discussões sobre a mecânica concreta de como os EUA estimulariam instituições democráticas ou desenvolvimento econômico", escreve ele.
Nas tragédias gregas, a queda do herói é freqüentemente plotada em termos de sua "hamartia"- "erro trágico" do herói que redunda em catástrofe. O que em última instância lançou os "neocons" em desgraça pode ter sido um gosto residual pelo pensamento categórico marxista-hegeliano. Pessoas que deveriam ser mais esclarecidas passaram a acreditar que qualquer país é igual a outro e que a inevitabilidade histórica faria o trabalho braçal por eles. Agora, a tragédia neoconservadora é também nossa.
55) Rio Grande do Sul: o estado ideal...
Calma, não é para agora...
Seria para daqui a 15 ou 20 anos, se tudo der certo.
Em todo caso, líderes do Rio Grande do Sul já tomaram consciência dos problemas atuais e do que deve ser feito para encaminhar soluções satisfatórias a cada um deles.
Leiam a matéria desta sexta-feira, 10 de março de 2006, do jornal gaúcho Zero Hora:
"Futuro ideal do Estado toma forma
Representantes dos poderes e de entidades empresariais e de trabalhadores esboçaram ontem soluções para tirar o Estado da estagnação em encontro do projeto O Rio Grande que queremos.
Apesar de agregar categorias com bandeiras distintas, os cerca de 800 participantes da primeira etapa do projeto O Rio Grande que queremos - agenda estratégica 2006-2020 conseguiram finalizar ontem um esboço do futuro ideal do Estado nos próximos 15 anos.
Depois de diagnosticar o que emperra ou estimula o desenvolvimento gaúcho na quarta-feira, entidades de trabalhadores, empresários e poderes definiram 91 manchetes positivas de jornais a serem lidas até 2020. Uma equipe técnica permanente irá se basear no material para detalhar objetivos de curto, médio e longo prazos. Em agosto, o trabalho com soluções estará concluído (veja o quadro).
O segredo do consenso foi engavetar reclamações pontuais e focar problemas globais, como a crise financeira. O Estado teve um déficit de R$ 755 milhões nas contas públicas no ano passado e está à frente apenas do Piauí quando se trata de capacidade de investimento.
- O filtro final já saiu. Há agendas pessoais, mas as coletivas são as mesmas - explica Flávio Sabbadini, presidente da Federação do Comércio de Bens e de Serviços do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (Fecomércio).
Segundo o presidente da Federação da Agricultura do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (Farsul), Carlos Sperotto, é preciso respeitar os resultados da discussão:
- Nosso setor defendeu que temos de mudar o perfil produtivo gaúcho e diversificar.
CUT não quis participar do Agenda estratégica
Presidente estadual da Força Sindical, Cláudio Janta deixou de lado a regulamentação de leis e a redução da jornada de trabalho. A entidade representa 76 sindicatos da iniciativa privada, dois sindicatos estaduais e cinco federações, totalizando 1,1 milhão de filiados.
- Não podemos ficar discutindo o mínimo enquanto fábricas fecham e trabalhadores são demitidos devido à crise do Estado. Não dá para perder mais 20 anos - diz.
A Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) se recusou a participar das discussões na Fiergs. Em nota oficial, a entidade sustenta que há um desequilíbrio na participação de empresários e trabalhadores. Afirma que organizações sociais históricas, como o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), não foram convidadas para o processo de construção coletiva. Em abril, a CUT irá realizar um seminário para discutir crise e desenvolvimento no Estado.
As conclusões da primeira etapa do projeto
O que impulsionou o crescimento do Estado nas últimas cinco décadas
- Espírito empreendedor do gaúcho
- Formação cultural e étnica variada
- Sistema educacional diferenciado
- Vontade e força política dos governantes
- Capacidade de trabalho
- Qualidade humana
- Organização da sociedade
- Preservação dos valores morais
- Localização geográfica
O que prejudicou o desenvolvimento gaúcho
- O custo do Estado (burocracia, falta de sustentabilidade da previdência pública e baixa capacidade de investimento)
- Aumento da carga tributária e concentração na esfera federal
- Decadência da qualidade da educação
Qual o futuro ideal
Participantes definiram 91 manchetes de jornais a serem lidas até 2020. Veja as principais:
"Estado tem crescimento de 9% em 2020, com crescimento médio de 8% ao ano"
"ONU reconhece qualidade do ensino gaúcho"
"RS é referência mundial em qualidade de vida"
"RS é referência nacional em gestão pública"
"RS é exemplo de desenvolvimento sustentável"
"Carga tributária atinge índice de países que mais crescem"
"RS atinge auto-suficiência de energia"
"RS investe 20% da arrecadação"
"RS é o Estado que mais cresceu nos últimos 10 anos no Brasil"
"RS: 14 anos sem greves e invasões"
"Renda per capita gaúcha supera à da Coréia do Sul"
"Zerado o déficit habitacional no RS"
"O RS é um Estado seguro"
"Melhor taxa de distribuição de renda é a do RS"
"Extra: grupo Agenda Estratégica de 2006 reúne-se em 8 de março de 2020 para festejar os objetivos superados"
Os próximos passos
Março
Técnicos das federações empresariais e consultores começam a esmiuçar as propostas e verificar a viabilidade. A equipe técnica será permanente.
26 de abril
Cerca de 60 pessoas escolhidas no primeiro seminário se reúnem e começam a detalhar objetivos de curto, médio e longo prazos com base no documento finalizado em março.
Os participantes irão criar de 10 a 15 comitês temáticos para discutir problemas e soluções até agosto.
28 de junho
O grupo formado no primeiro seminário irá definir indicadores, metas e ações e meios de atingi-los.
Início de agosto
Um documento definitivo com diagnóstico, soluções e metas para o Estado até 2020 será entregue aos candidatos a governador. Uma ONG será criada para acompanhar a aplicação das medidas sugeridas permanentemente."
Nota final PRA:
Bem, o diagnóstico foi feito, o caderno de tarefas foi feito, agora falta cumpri-lo. Trata-se, em todo caso, de um bom começo para um debate racional sobre prioridades para a agenda do estado na campanha eleitoral estadual deste ano de 2006.
Eu não sou gaúcho, mas desejo cumprimentar a todos os envolvidos neste exercício pela clareza da iniciativa e pela disposição demonstrada em começar a arregaçar as mangas em torno de propostas concretas para tirar a economia do estado do relativo marasmo em que ela vive hoje.
Que tal se o Brasil fizesse o mesmo?
Seria para daqui a 15 ou 20 anos, se tudo der certo.
Em todo caso, líderes do Rio Grande do Sul já tomaram consciência dos problemas atuais e do que deve ser feito para encaminhar soluções satisfatórias a cada um deles.
Leiam a matéria desta sexta-feira, 10 de março de 2006, do jornal gaúcho Zero Hora:
"Futuro ideal do Estado toma forma
Representantes dos poderes e de entidades empresariais e de trabalhadores esboçaram ontem soluções para tirar o Estado da estagnação em encontro do projeto O Rio Grande que queremos.
Apesar de agregar categorias com bandeiras distintas, os cerca de 800 participantes da primeira etapa do projeto O Rio Grande que queremos - agenda estratégica 2006-2020 conseguiram finalizar ontem um esboço do futuro ideal do Estado nos próximos 15 anos.
Depois de diagnosticar o que emperra ou estimula o desenvolvimento gaúcho na quarta-feira, entidades de trabalhadores, empresários e poderes definiram 91 manchetes positivas de jornais a serem lidas até 2020. Uma equipe técnica permanente irá se basear no material para detalhar objetivos de curto, médio e longo prazos. Em agosto, o trabalho com soluções estará concluído (veja o quadro).
O segredo do consenso foi engavetar reclamações pontuais e focar problemas globais, como a crise financeira. O Estado teve um déficit de R$ 755 milhões nas contas públicas no ano passado e está à frente apenas do Piauí quando se trata de capacidade de investimento.
- O filtro final já saiu. Há agendas pessoais, mas as coletivas são as mesmas - explica Flávio Sabbadini, presidente da Federação do Comércio de Bens e de Serviços do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (Fecomércio).
Segundo o presidente da Federação da Agricultura do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (Farsul), Carlos Sperotto, é preciso respeitar os resultados da discussão:
- Nosso setor defendeu que temos de mudar o perfil produtivo gaúcho e diversificar.
CUT não quis participar do Agenda estratégica
Presidente estadual da Força Sindical, Cláudio Janta deixou de lado a regulamentação de leis e a redução da jornada de trabalho. A entidade representa 76 sindicatos da iniciativa privada, dois sindicatos estaduais e cinco federações, totalizando 1,1 milhão de filiados.
- Não podemos ficar discutindo o mínimo enquanto fábricas fecham e trabalhadores são demitidos devido à crise do Estado. Não dá para perder mais 20 anos - diz.
A Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) se recusou a participar das discussões na Fiergs. Em nota oficial, a entidade sustenta que há um desequilíbrio na participação de empresários e trabalhadores. Afirma que organizações sociais históricas, como o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), não foram convidadas para o processo de construção coletiva. Em abril, a CUT irá realizar um seminário para discutir crise e desenvolvimento no Estado.
As conclusões da primeira etapa do projeto
O que impulsionou o crescimento do Estado nas últimas cinco décadas
- Espírito empreendedor do gaúcho
- Formação cultural e étnica variada
- Sistema educacional diferenciado
- Vontade e força política dos governantes
- Capacidade de trabalho
- Qualidade humana
- Organização da sociedade
- Preservação dos valores morais
- Localização geográfica
O que prejudicou o desenvolvimento gaúcho
- O custo do Estado (burocracia, falta de sustentabilidade da previdência pública e baixa capacidade de investimento)
- Aumento da carga tributária e concentração na esfera federal
- Decadência da qualidade da educação
Qual o futuro ideal
Participantes definiram 91 manchetes de jornais a serem lidas até 2020. Veja as principais:
"Estado tem crescimento de 9% em 2020, com crescimento médio de 8% ao ano"
"ONU reconhece qualidade do ensino gaúcho"
"RS é referência mundial em qualidade de vida"
"RS é referência nacional em gestão pública"
"RS é exemplo de desenvolvimento sustentável"
"Carga tributária atinge índice de países que mais crescem"
"RS atinge auto-suficiência de energia"
"RS investe 20% da arrecadação"
"RS é o Estado que mais cresceu nos últimos 10 anos no Brasil"
"RS: 14 anos sem greves e invasões"
"Renda per capita gaúcha supera à da Coréia do Sul"
"Zerado o déficit habitacional no RS"
"O RS é um Estado seguro"
"Melhor taxa de distribuição de renda é a do RS"
"Extra: grupo Agenda Estratégica de 2006 reúne-se em 8 de março de 2020 para festejar os objetivos superados"
Os próximos passos
Março
Técnicos das federações empresariais e consultores começam a esmiuçar as propostas e verificar a viabilidade. A equipe técnica será permanente.
26 de abril
Cerca de 60 pessoas escolhidas no primeiro seminário se reúnem e começam a detalhar objetivos de curto, médio e longo prazos com base no documento finalizado em março.
Os participantes irão criar de 10 a 15 comitês temáticos para discutir problemas e soluções até agosto.
28 de junho
O grupo formado no primeiro seminário irá definir indicadores, metas e ações e meios de atingi-los.
Início de agosto
Um documento definitivo com diagnóstico, soluções e metas para o Estado até 2020 será entregue aos candidatos a governador. Uma ONG será criada para acompanhar a aplicação das medidas sugeridas permanentemente."
Nota final PRA:
Bem, o diagnóstico foi feito, o caderno de tarefas foi feito, agora falta cumpri-lo. Trata-se, em todo caso, de um bom começo para um debate racional sobre prioridades para a agenda do estado na campanha eleitoral estadual deste ano de 2006.
Eu não sou gaúcho, mas desejo cumprimentar a todos os envolvidos neste exercício pela clareza da iniciativa e pela disposição demonstrada em começar a arregaçar as mangas em torno de propostas concretas para tirar a economia do estado do relativo marasmo em que ela vive hoje.
Que tal se o Brasil fizesse o mesmo?
54) TV digital: a confusão está instalada...
Transcrevo abaixo material retirado do Jornal da Ciência, edição de 10 de março de 2006, sobre a confusão instalada em relação à escolha de um padrão para a TV digital barsileira.
Figura em primeiro lugar mensagem que eu mandei para esse jornal, seguida de matéria transcrita da Agência Carta Maior:
Leitor opina sobre o processo de escolha do padrão de TV digital
Que tal, se por uma vez, o Estado dissesse: renuncio a uma escolha que sempre será parcial, incompleta e falha, e deixo à sociedade e aos agentes econômicos a liberdade de escolha
Mensagem de Paulo Roberto de Almeida, sociólogo (pralmeida@mac.com e http://www.pralmeida.org):
“Perguntar não ofende: Se é para defender a soberania nacional e os interesses ditos populares na definição de um padrão para a TV digital no Brasil, e se a definição por algum dos existentes, ou mesmo a de um novo, híbrido, como defendem alguns, sempre se dará em detrimento de uma série de vantagens (ou desvantagens) inevitavelmente associadas a qualquer um deles, por que não optar pelo óbvio, pelo mais simples, pelo que dá a maior liberdade possível a todos e a cada um, por que não optar por um que desobrigue o Estado de ter de fazer uma dolorosa e dubitável escolha, que sempre será acusada de parcial e leviana (além das inevitáveis suspeitas de corrupção), por que não optar pela não opção?
Exatamente: que tal, se por uma vez, o Estado dissesse: renuncio a uma escolha que sempre será parcial, incompleta e falha, e deixo à sociedade e aos agentes econômicos a liberdade de escolha.
Senhores: façam as suas apostas, o caminho está livre, decidam vocês mesmos, operadores, provedores de programas, fabricantes de aparelhos, que tecnologia querem seguir e sejam livres em seus respectivos empreendimentos. O Estado não adotará nenhum padrão: a sociedade e o mercado o farão, em total liberdade, pois a concorrência aberta sempre foi o melhor dos sistemas econômicos. E que vença o melhor... (Depois de alguma confusão, o melhor do ponto de vista dos consumidores acabará fatalmente se impondo).”
====================================================
Governo prioriza política industrial, sob protestos de organizações
Em audiência com entidades da sociedade civil, a ministra da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff, confirmou que a prioridade nas negociações se concentra na instalação da indústria de semicondutores no Brasil como contrapartida
Organizações contestam postura do governo.
Relegado às altas rodas técnicas de universidades e do Ministério das Comunicações até o ano passado, a definição sobre a formatação do Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital (SBTVD) vem se aproximando de um momento crucial: a escolha do padrão tecnológico.
A proximidade da data vem acirrando a disputa entre radiodifusores, empresas de telecomunicações e tecnologias estrangeiras e dentro do governo. O objeto da briga é o modelo de TV brasileiro, que chega a mais de 90% dos lares do país, e é cobiçado tanto pelo seu potencial de mercado quanto pela sua importância política na formação da opinião de ampla parcela da população.
Por fora da briga de cachorros grandes, que envolve um cercado de R$ 100 bilhões nos próximos 15 anos, movimentos sociais, entidades representativas e organizações que lutam por uma comunicação democrática buscam o adiamento de qualquer decisão neste momento e querem a ampliação do debate para o conjunto da sociedade.
Apesar da tentativa frustrada de aprovação do padrão tecnológico japonês (ISDB), há um mês, o ministro das Comunicações, Hélio Costa, conseguiu pautar no interior do governo a concepção de que a decisão a ser tomada seria relativa à escolha de um dos padrões tecnológicos de outro país para o SBTVD, ignorando totalmente as pesquisas produzidas no país que possibilitariam uma tecnologia majoritariamente brasileira.
O processo passou a ser conduzido pela ministra da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff, que se reuniu com os diversos atores na disputa, principalmente os representantes de padrões estrangeiros.
A discussão evoluiu para uma negociação com os japoneses e europeus pelas melhores vantagens e teve o foco direcionado para contrapartidas destes padrões no plano da política industrial.
Fontes do setor consultadas pela Carta Maior acreditam que as notícias sobre a definição em favor dos japoneses tenham procedência. Matéria publicada no jornal “Folha de SP” nesta quarta-feira (08) deu como certa esta decisão.
Segundo a reportagem, a escolha do ISDB se justificaria pela oferta dos japoneses de investir US$ 2 bilhões em uma fábrica de semicondutores no país e pelo forte lobby das emissoras de TV em ano de eleições. Mas no mesmo dia o presidente Lula negou, em Londres, que já tenha sido tomada qualquer decisão.
A análise feita por pessoas próximas ao processo de negociação é que a matéria, supostamente plantada, teria bastante fundamento, mas que o governo fez que não era com ele por que ainda tem esperança de receber nova proposta dos europeus e forçar mais a negociação.
Em audiência realizada com entidades da sociedade civil nesta quarta-feira (8), a ministra Dilma enfatizou que o objetivo central do governo é conseguir trazer uma fábrica de semicondutores (chips), sem a qual o país aprofundaria uma posição periférica na economia global, aumentaria o déficit na balança comercial e "perderia a guerra".
Segundo Edison Lima, do Sindicato dos Pesquisadores em Ciência em Tecnologia de São Paulo, hoje os eletrônicos são o item mais deficitário da balança comercial brasileira, com resultado negativo de US$ 7 bilhões ao ano.
"Desta parcela, cerca de US$ 3 bi são referentes a semicondutores importados, o triplo do que o país exporta por ano em aviões, para fazer uma comparação", diz.
Na avaliação da ministra, todo o resto das definições - desde o modelo de exploração dos serviços e um novo marco regulatório até as regras de transição – seria feito em momento posterior.
Na audiência, os integrantes de organizações da sociedade civil questionaram a ministra sobre como a sociedade seria ouvida nesta discussão, uma vez que a negociação em curso já envolve a definição do padrão tecnológico, amarrando determinadas definições sobre o modelo. Dilma Rousseff respondeu afirmando que a negociação não será pública, que pode não ter conclusão no dia 10 (sexta-feira) e que importa pouco, do ponto de vista do modelo, o padrão escolhido, uma vez que as tecnologias tendem a convergir em um curto espaço de tempo, e todas teriam demonstrado disponibilidade em incorporar soluções nacionais. O diferencial seria quem poderia oferecer a fábrica de semicondutores.
Mas a avaliação de alguns presentes na reunião é que pesou forte o lobby dos radiodifusores e o medo do governo de tê-los, se não como aliados, pelo menos não como inimigos até outubro.
"O governo não pode tratar esta decisão, que tem relevância para a nação e para o conjunto da sociedade e pode alterar o cenário concentrado da mídia brasileira, sob o ponto de vista do pragmatismo eleitoral", critica Diogo Moysés, do Intervozes.
O medo dos integrantes das organizações da sociedade civil é que a alegação das vantagens oferecidas pelos japoneses seja apenas um argumento para justificar a adoção do padrão tecnológico historicamente defendido pela Rede Globo.
A preocupação ganha fundamento pelo fato de os japoneses ainda não terem assegurado os investimentos na fábrica de semicondutores, diferente do que diz a reportagem do jornal Folha de São Paulo, e condicionarem esta oferta a uma análise e viabilidade de mercado e de modelo, conforme reportagem do jornalista Samuel Possebom publicada nesta quinta-feira no portal Tela Viva.
A vigorar esta exigência dos japoneses, o desenho do modelo de negócios e de exploração dos serviços do SBTVD teria de ser definido agora para garantir a montagem da fábrica para o Brasil, amarrando as definições sobre modelo de negócios e serviços, essenciais no SBTVD, segundo Celso Schröder, do Fórum Nacional pela Democratização da Comunicação.
"Não é na política industrial que está contido o desenho da nova cadeia de valor, que advirá da convergência, muito menos seu modelo de serviços e negócios, que deveriam ser os pontos-chaves da política do SBTVD".
Segundo integrantes das organizações, neste novo cenário, a política industrial conteria, sim, o desenho dos outros modelos e o governo passaria então a definir a parte essencial do SBTVD de forma não pública e sem ampla discussão com a sociedade, demonstrando mais uma vez o equívoco na condução do processo e a opção de privilegiar os interesses dos radiodifusores em detrimento da sociedade.
Esse quadro confirmaria a advertência contida na carta entregue pelas entidades à ministra Dilma Roussef, de que estaria em curso uma tentativa de "criar fatos consumados que terminem impedindo a realização de uma das maiores potencialidades da digitalização da TV aberta: a multiplicação do número de canais de televisão e a inclusão digital da população".
A posição foi endossada pela deputada Jandira Feghali (PCdoB-RJ), também presente à reunião. "A discussão de política industrial tem que ser feita junto com o modelo de exploração para evitar um fato consumado", disse.
Debate aberto
Para evitar a política de fato consumado as organizações da sociedade civil foram solicitar a ministra Dilma Roussef o adiamento da decisão e abertura de amplo debate com a sociedade. Estiveram presentes representantes da CUT, da Associação Brasileira de ONGs (Abong), do Intervozes - Coletivo Brasil de Comunicação Social, da Associação Brasileira de Canais Comunitários (ABCCOM), do Fórum Nacional pela Democratização da Comunicação (FNDC), da Articulação Nacional pelo Direito à Comunicação (Cris Brasil) e do Congresso Brasileiro de Cinema (CBC).
"Com a TV digital, será possível abrir a radiodifusão para novas operações como pequenas emissoras comerciais de âmbito local, canais legislativos, comunitários, universitários, públicos e até mesmo produzidos pelos próprios movimentos sociais. Esta decisão terá enormes impactos sociais, culturais e econômicos na vida brasileira e, por isso mesmo, necessita ser fruto de amplo debate", diz a carta entregue.
Os integrantes questionaram a ministra sobre a definição da exploração dos serviços e como a TV Digital poderia contribuir para a democratização da comunicação, permitindo a entrada de novos atores no espectro eletromagnético.
Outra preocupação manifestada pelos presentes foi a dispensa da tecnologia nacional produzida pelas universidades brasileiras.
"O Brasil investiu tempo, dinheiro e obteve ótimos resultados nas pesquisas que produziu. É importante saber se isso será considerado e como acontecerá, pois corremos o risco de colocar inovações que avançam frente à consagradas tecnologias na lata de lixo", questiona Edison Lima.
A posição do governo começa a revoltar também os pesquisadores.
"Vemos encoberta a discussão de áreas em que o Brasil pode de fato alavancar suas indústrias e criar um diferencial de qualidade, que é o caso do software e da geração de conteúdo, áreas que estão intimamente ligadas. Enganam-se aqueles que pensam que a adoção de um padrão estrangeiro não afetará o desenvolvimento de conteúdos", afirma texto escrito por Luis Fernando Soares e Guido Lemos, coordenadores de um dos consórcios brasileiros que produziu inovações tecnológicas.
Na avaliação de José Zunga, presidente da Federação Interestadual dos Trabalhadores em Telecomunicações (Fittel), outro ponto-chave que está sendo solapado no processo é a definição de regras que preparem a implantação da TV Digital no país. "É importante o cuidado com o ambiente regulatório frágil na área das comunicações, pois a criação de um novo serviço pode aumentar o fosso da desigualdade entre grandes e pequenos produtores caso não seja regulada sob a ótica da sociedade".
Também preocupada com isso, a deputada Jandira aproveitou a audiência realizada com a ministra Dilma Roussef para destacar a importância da implantação da TV digital ser feita segundo um marco regulatório democraticamente discutido. Ela informou que a Câmara dos Deputados prepara um seminário ainda para este mês e questionou a ministra sobre quando o governo passaria a incorporar o Parlamento no processo de decisão sobre os rumos do SBTVD.
A ministra reiterou a posição de que o marco regulatório ficaria para depois, mantendo impasse com a posição das entidades. Ao final da reunião, as entidades cobraram que o governo defina concretamente como vai incorporar a sociedade civil no debate. A ministra prometeu uma resposta, mas manteve a posição de que a discussão neste momento ficará restrita ao governo.
(Carta Maior, 9/3)
Figura em primeiro lugar mensagem que eu mandei para esse jornal, seguida de matéria transcrita da Agência Carta Maior:
Leitor opina sobre o processo de escolha do padrão de TV digital
Que tal, se por uma vez, o Estado dissesse: renuncio a uma escolha que sempre será parcial, incompleta e falha, e deixo à sociedade e aos agentes econômicos a liberdade de escolha
Mensagem de Paulo Roberto de Almeida, sociólogo (pralmeida@mac.com e http://www.pralmeida.org):
“Perguntar não ofende: Se é para defender a soberania nacional e os interesses ditos populares na definição de um padrão para a TV digital no Brasil, e se a definição por algum dos existentes, ou mesmo a de um novo, híbrido, como defendem alguns, sempre se dará em detrimento de uma série de vantagens (ou desvantagens) inevitavelmente associadas a qualquer um deles, por que não optar pelo óbvio, pelo mais simples, pelo que dá a maior liberdade possível a todos e a cada um, por que não optar por um que desobrigue o Estado de ter de fazer uma dolorosa e dubitável escolha, que sempre será acusada de parcial e leviana (além das inevitáveis suspeitas de corrupção), por que não optar pela não opção?
Exatamente: que tal, se por uma vez, o Estado dissesse: renuncio a uma escolha que sempre será parcial, incompleta e falha, e deixo à sociedade e aos agentes econômicos a liberdade de escolha.
Senhores: façam as suas apostas, o caminho está livre, decidam vocês mesmos, operadores, provedores de programas, fabricantes de aparelhos, que tecnologia querem seguir e sejam livres em seus respectivos empreendimentos. O Estado não adotará nenhum padrão: a sociedade e o mercado o farão, em total liberdade, pois a concorrência aberta sempre foi o melhor dos sistemas econômicos. E que vença o melhor... (Depois de alguma confusão, o melhor do ponto de vista dos consumidores acabará fatalmente se impondo).”
====================================================
Governo prioriza política industrial, sob protestos de organizações
Em audiência com entidades da sociedade civil, a ministra da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff, confirmou que a prioridade nas negociações se concentra na instalação da indústria de semicondutores no Brasil como contrapartida
Organizações contestam postura do governo.
Relegado às altas rodas técnicas de universidades e do Ministério das Comunicações até o ano passado, a definição sobre a formatação do Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital (SBTVD) vem se aproximando de um momento crucial: a escolha do padrão tecnológico.
A proximidade da data vem acirrando a disputa entre radiodifusores, empresas de telecomunicações e tecnologias estrangeiras e dentro do governo. O objeto da briga é o modelo de TV brasileiro, que chega a mais de 90% dos lares do país, e é cobiçado tanto pelo seu potencial de mercado quanto pela sua importância política na formação da opinião de ampla parcela da população.
Por fora da briga de cachorros grandes, que envolve um cercado de R$ 100 bilhões nos próximos 15 anos, movimentos sociais, entidades representativas e organizações que lutam por uma comunicação democrática buscam o adiamento de qualquer decisão neste momento e querem a ampliação do debate para o conjunto da sociedade.
Apesar da tentativa frustrada de aprovação do padrão tecnológico japonês (ISDB), há um mês, o ministro das Comunicações, Hélio Costa, conseguiu pautar no interior do governo a concepção de que a decisão a ser tomada seria relativa à escolha de um dos padrões tecnológicos de outro país para o SBTVD, ignorando totalmente as pesquisas produzidas no país que possibilitariam uma tecnologia majoritariamente brasileira.
O processo passou a ser conduzido pela ministra da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff, que se reuniu com os diversos atores na disputa, principalmente os representantes de padrões estrangeiros.
A discussão evoluiu para uma negociação com os japoneses e europeus pelas melhores vantagens e teve o foco direcionado para contrapartidas destes padrões no plano da política industrial.
Fontes do setor consultadas pela Carta Maior acreditam que as notícias sobre a definição em favor dos japoneses tenham procedência. Matéria publicada no jornal “Folha de SP” nesta quarta-feira (08) deu como certa esta decisão.
Segundo a reportagem, a escolha do ISDB se justificaria pela oferta dos japoneses de investir US$ 2 bilhões em uma fábrica de semicondutores no país e pelo forte lobby das emissoras de TV em ano de eleições. Mas no mesmo dia o presidente Lula negou, em Londres, que já tenha sido tomada qualquer decisão.
A análise feita por pessoas próximas ao processo de negociação é que a matéria, supostamente plantada, teria bastante fundamento, mas que o governo fez que não era com ele por que ainda tem esperança de receber nova proposta dos europeus e forçar mais a negociação.
Em audiência realizada com entidades da sociedade civil nesta quarta-feira (8), a ministra Dilma enfatizou que o objetivo central do governo é conseguir trazer uma fábrica de semicondutores (chips), sem a qual o país aprofundaria uma posição periférica na economia global, aumentaria o déficit na balança comercial e "perderia a guerra".
Segundo Edison Lima, do Sindicato dos Pesquisadores em Ciência em Tecnologia de São Paulo, hoje os eletrônicos são o item mais deficitário da balança comercial brasileira, com resultado negativo de US$ 7 bilhões ao ano.
"Desta parcela, cerca de US$ 3 bi são referentes a semicondutores importados, o triplo do que o país exporta por ano em aviões, para fazer uma comparação", diz.
Na avaliação da ministra, todo o resto das definições - desde o modelo de exploração dos serviços e um novo marco regulatório até as regras de transição – seria feito em momento posterior.
Na audiência, os integrantes de organizações da sociedade civil questionaram a ministra sobre como a sociedade seria ouvida nesta discussão, uma vez que a negociação em curso já envolve a definição do padrão tecnológico, amarrando determinadas definições sobre o modelo. Dilma Rousseff respondeu afirmando que a negociação não será pública, que pode não ter conclusão no dia 10 (sexta-feira) e que importa pouco, do ponto de vista do modelo, o padrão escolhido, uma vez que as tecnologias tendem a convergir em um curto espaço de tempo, e todas teriam demonstrado disponibilidade em incorporar soluções nacionais. O diferencial seria quem poderia oferecer a fábrica de semicondutores.
Mas a avaliação de alguns presentes na reunião é que pesou forte o lobby dos radiodifusores e o medo do governo de tê-los, se não como aliados, pelo menos não como inimigos até outubro.
"O governo não pode tratar esta decisão, que tem relevância para a nação e para o conjunto da sociedade e pode alterar o cenário concentrado da mídia brasileira, sob o ponto de vista do pragmatismo eleitoral", critica Diogo Moysés, do Intervozes.
O medo dos integrantes das organizações da sociedade civil é que a alegação das vantagens oferecidas pelos japoneses seja apenas um argumento para justificar a adoção do padrão tecnológico historicamente defendido pela Rede Globo.
A preocupação ganha fundamento pelo fato de os japoneses ainda não terem assegurado os investimentos na fábrica de semicondutores, diferente do que diz a reportagem do jornal Folha de São Paulo, e condicionarem esta oferta a uma análise e viabilidade de mercado e de modelo, conforme reportagem do jornalista Samuel Possebom publicada nesta quinta-feira no portal Tela Viva.
A vigorar esta exigência dos japoneses, o desenho do modelo de negócios e de exploração dos serviços do SBTVD teria de ser definido agora para garantir a montagem da fábrica para o Brasil, amarrando as definições sobre modelo de negócios e serviços, essenciais no SBTVD, segundo Celso Schröder, do Fórum Nacional pela Democratização da Comunicação.
"Não é na política industrial que está contido o desenho da nova cadeia de valor, que advirá da convergência, muito menos seu modelo de serviços e negócios, que deveriam ser os pontos-chaves da política do SBTVD".
Segundo integrantes das organizações, neste novo cenário, a política industrial conteria, sim, o desenho dos outros modelos e o governo passaria então a definir a parte essencial do SBTVD de forma não pública e sem ampla discussão com a sociedade, demonstrando mais uma vez o equívoco na condução do processo e a opção de privilegiar os interesses dos radiodifusores em detrimento da sociedade.
Esse quadro confirmaria a advertência contida na carta entregue pelas entidades à ministra Dilma Roussef, de que estaria em curso uma tentativa de "criar fatos consumados que terminem impedindo a realização de uma das maiores potencialidades da digitalização da TV aberta: a multiplicação do número de canais de televisão e a inclusão digital da população".
A posição foi endossada pela deputada Jandira Feghali (PCdoB-RJ), também presente à reunião. "A discussão de política industrial tem que ser feita junto com o modelo de exploração para evitar um fato consumado", disse.
Debate aberto
Para evitar a política de fato consumado as organizações da sociedade civil foram solicitar a ministra Dilma Roussef o adiamento da decisão e abertura de amplo debate com a sociedade. Estiveram presentes representantes da CUT, da Associação Brasileira de ONGs (Abong), do Intervozes - Coletivo Brasil de Comunicação Social, da Associação Brasileira de Canais Comunitários (ABCCOM), do Fórum Nacional pela Democratização da Comunicação (FNDC), da Articulação Nacional pelo Direito à Comunicação (Cris Brasil) e do Congresso Brasileiro de Cinema (CBC).
"Com a TV digital, será possível abrir a radiodifusão para novas operações como pequenas emissoras comerciais de âmbito local, canais legislativos, comunitários, universitários, públicos e até mesmo produzidos pelos próprios movimentos sociais. Esta decisão terá enormes impactos sociais, culturais e econômicos na vida brasileira e, por isso mesmo, necessita ser fruto de amplo debate", diz a carta entregue.
Os integrantes questionaram a ministra sobre a definição da exploração dos serviços e como a TV Digital poderia contribuir para a democratização da comunicação, permitindo a entrada de novos atores no espectro eletromagnético.
Outra preocupação manifestada pelos presentes foi a dispensa da tecnologia nacional produzida pelas universidades brasileiras.
"O Brasil investiu tempo, dinheiro e obteve ótimos resultados nas pesquisas que produziu. É importante saber se isso será considerado e como acontecerá, pois corremos o risco de colocar inovações que avançam frente à consagradas tecnologias na lata de lixo", questiona Edison Lima.
A posição do governo começa a revoltar também os pesquisadores.
"Vemos encoberta a discussão de áreas em que o Brasil pode de fato alavancar suas indústrias e criar um diferencial de qualidade, que é o caso do software e da geração de conteúdo, áreas que estão intimamente ligadas. Enganam-se aqueles que pensam que a adoção de um padrão estrangeiro não afetará o desenvolvimento de conteúdos", afirma texto escrito por Luis Fernando Soares e Guido Lemos, coordenadores de um dos consórcios brasileiros que produziu inovações tecnológicas.
Na avaliação de José Zunga, presidente da Federação Interestadual dos Trabalhadores em Telecomunicações (Fittel), outro ponto-chave que está sendo solapado no processo é a definição de regras que preparem a implantação da TV Digital no país. "É importante o cuidado com o ambiente regulatório frágil na área das comunicações, pois a criação de um novo serviço pode aumentar o fosso da desigualdade entre grandes e pequenos produtores caso não seja regulada sob a ótica da sociedade".
Também preocupada com isso, a deputada Jandira aproveitou a audiência realizada com a ministra Dilma Roussef para destacar a importância da implantação da TV digital ser feita segundo um marco regulatório democraticamente discutido. Ela informou que a Câmara dos Deputados prepara um seminário ainda para este mês e questionou a ministra sobre quando o governo passaria a incorporar o Parlamento no processo de decisão sobre os rumos do SBTVD.
A ministra reiterou a posição de que o marco regulatório ficaria para depois, mantendo impasse com a posição das entidades. Ao final da reunião, as entidades cobraram que o governo defina concretamente como vai incorporar a sociedade civil no debate. A ministra prometeu uma resposta, mas manteve a posição de que a discussão neste momento ficará restrita ao governo.
(Carta Maior, 9/3)
quarta-feira, março 08, 2006
53) China: enfrentando o desafio da pobreza rural
Do site do instituto de pesquisas estratégicas Stratfor, em 7 de março de 2006:
China: Riding the Rural Tiger
By Rodger Baker
Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have been touting the "New Socialist Countryside" initiative. The initiative is being painted as a priority for reducing China's widening rural/urban gap in the near term, and for creating a more sustainable and robust economic future in the long term. The problems of rural economic reform, the social gap and rural unrest rank high on the agenda of China's central leadership and in the current session of the National People's Congress (NPC). Potential solutions to these problems form the heart of China's 11th five-year economic plan (2006-2010).
Over the past quarter century, China has made remarkable economic progress. By all accounts, its cities are booming: The bicycle-clogged alleys of the past are now traffic-clogged avenues, and construction cranes rise within cities as part of a seemingly endless rejuvenation and modernization campaign. Statistically speaking, China has never been stronger; gross domestic product (GDP) has risen from $200 billion in 1978 to $2.7 trillion in 2005. Foreign trade last year reached $1.4 trillion, with a trade surplus of nearly $102 billion. Exports accounted for 18 percent of the 9.9 percent GDP growth China reports for 2005. In the same year, the country utilized some $60.3 billion in foreign direct investment and sent $6.92 billion overseas in non-financial-sector investments. Foreign currency reserves at the end of 2005 registered $818.9 billion, rivaling Japan's.
But the growth has been anything but even. Urban growth continues to outpace rural growth, despite income increases across the board. In 2005, per capita disposable income reached $1,310 in urban areas, compared to just $405 in rural net income. Income disparity in 1984 was about a 2 to 1 ratio; now it is 3 to 1. Overall, the poorest 10 percent of China's citizens hold only 1 percent of the nation's wealth, and the wealthiest 10 percent claim 50 percent of the money. Even in urban areas, there are massive disparities: The poorest 20 percent of urban-dwellers control just 2.75 percent of private income; the top 20 percent control 60 percent of the total.
The gaps manifest in other ways as well. China's registered urban unemployment stands at 4.2 percent, but rural unemployment -- which isn't measured officially -- is anecdotally much higher, and even Beijing admits that some 200 million rural workers have migrated to cities recently in search of employment. That represents a substantial portion of the total rural population, which numbers 800 million to 900 million. In the cities, these migrants are treated as second-class citizens at best. In the countryside, they fare little better: Measures of education and health care are substantially lower. Moreover, there has been little legal recourse for farmers, who technically don't even own the land they work, when local officials confiscate the land for new industrial and housing projects.
The central government is well aware of these problems and, perhaps ironically, began issuing public cautions about social and economic tensions years before the international business community bothered to notice. Unrestrained economic growth no longer is viewed as a viable or sustainable option, and Beijing has begun to reassert more centralized control over economic development, with a particular emphasis on reducing the rural-urban gap.
But in seeking to address this problem, Beijing has exposed a deeper issue: endemic corruption and self-interest at the local and provincial levels of government. It is where economic disparity and government corruption intersect that social clashes occur most often.
Geography of Corruption
More than 25 years after its launch by Deng Xiaoping, China's economic reform and opening program has reached a critical juncture. Economic reforms have outpaced social and political reforms, and historical strains between the coast and inland regions, between urban and rural, and between the educated and less-educated are threatening the fabric of social stability and the central government's ability to rule. It is easy to see the frayed edges: Local protests turn violent where urban development projects eat away at the rural land. As the social instability moves closer to the coastal cities, there is a risk that China's competitiveness as an investment destination will be harmed, thereby triggering a spiral of economic and social degradation. Social instability also lays bare the growing rift between the central government and the local and regional leaders.
From a historical perspective, China's apparently stunning economic success stems from the pursuit and implementation of the quintessential Asian economic plan, which can be summed up as "growth for the sake of growth." Japan, South Korea, most of the Southeast Asian "tigers" and China all facilitated their economic "miracles" by focusing on the flow-through of capital, without regard for profits. As long as money was flowing in, there could be jobs. As long as there were jobs, there was a stabilizing social force. There was also an overall rise in personal wealth, though rarely was it evenly spread.
The coastal provinces and cities became the focal points for international investments in manufacturing, as investors exploited preferential government policies and cheap labor. The rural areas -- traditionally the backbone of China's economy -- and the petroleum and heavy industry of the northeast (which had been core to early Communist Chinese economics) faded in relevance. Though Beijing occasionally promoted more inland development and investment opportunities, geography and a lack of infrastructure made these unappealing to investors. The concentration of wealth in the coastal regions was a source of minor social tensions, but restrictions on internal migration kept a buffer between rural and urban populations, and social frictions remained comparatively low. These restrictions, however, have been only selectively enforced as of late, and many are being lifted.
The booming coastal economies created clear opportunities for corruption. As provincial and local Party cadre and political leaders became the gatekeepers for foreign investments, they also became mini-emperors of their own economic fiefdoms. Collusion and nepotism -- always a part of Chinese political society -- became even more entrenched as the money flowed in. With the central government fixated on growth, the best-performing local leaders were rewarded. The more foreign capital they were able to attract, the greater their personal influence and takings. These officials were not measured on efficiency or profitability, but on total flow-through of capital, rates of growth, employment and social stability.
This partly explains why attempts by the previous government to address the unequal development in China failed. Each time former President Jiang Zemin or former Premier Zhu Rongji tried to adjust policies and financial flows to the interior, there were strong objections from the wealthier coastal provinces. When they launched anti-corruption campaigns, the graft their investigators uncovered was deep and wide, and in some cases even threatened to reach up to the top echelons of power -- at times implicating Jiang himself. This only further entrenched the problem and removed incentives for Jiang and Zhu to act; after all, both were part of the so-called Shanghai clique and derived their political support from the coastal regions.
Under these two leaders, the government was much more successful in reducing the independence of the military, as neither Jiang nor Zhu had significant ties into the institution. But because the economic and political elite in the coastal regions were the source of the central leadership's power, they were able to repel reforms sought by the central government.
This all changed with the coming of Hu and Wen, both of whom are from rural areas. Wen, a perennial political survivor known for his ability to connect with the "common man," has been practically deified among rural-dwellers on account of his 10-year-old coat. That the premier still wears the same coat after 10 years is a clear sign (according to ample coverage by the news media and blog sites) of his care for the people, rather than for himself.
Herein lies the secret of Hu and Wen's strategy to regain control over the local and regional governments and Party officials. Whereas Jiang and Zhu tried using anti-corruption campaigns -- only to end up implicating themselves and their core supporters -- Hu and Wen are moving to harness the power of China's rural masses. Depending on which Chinese official you believe, this is a mass of humanity numbering from 700 million to 950 million people. Even at the low end of the estimates, however, rural-dwellers make up more than half of China's population -- and greatly outnumber the 300 million middle- and upper-class Chinese living mainly in Beijing and the coastal cities.
Harnessing the Masses
Chinese leaders have a long history of using the masses as weapons when challenges to central authority arise -- from the attempts to harness the Boxers at the turn of the 20th century to Mao's communist revolution to the Cultural Revolution. In each case, the process was chaotic and the outcomes were uncertain. Though Mao eventually succeeded in rallying the rural populace to effect his communist revolution, it simply served as a starting point for a new Chinese system. The use of the Boxers led to the dissolution of the Chinese dynastic system, and the Cultural Revolution wiped out whatever economic gains had been made, leaving China to start nearly from scratch once again.
What Hu and Wen intend to do is rally the masses to pressure local leaders into returning authority to the center. From this, centralized economic direction will, they hope, lead to more equalized development without significantly undermining the country's growth (though a slight slowing will be expected). Ultimately, the causes of social discontent would be mitigated and social frictions reduced as money is shifted to the interior.
This is a rather risky proposal, but China's core leadership sees this as the least distasteful among a poor selection of options. The initiative is being presented not as a disruptive social revolution, but as the duty of those who got rich first to assist those who trail them. The initial details of the official plan include greater spending in rural areas on infrastructure, education, healthcare and agriculture, with funding coming primarily from the urban centers. The plan already is meeting with mixed reactions from China's regional leaders -- and while the NPC is expected to approve the plan, that doesn't mean that they like it.
However, as the government's core leadership has pointed out ad nauseum over the past year, the Chinese economy is in a fragile state, and the rural/urban inequalities threaten to undo everything China has built up since the economic opening and reform program began. Unless the central government regains complete control over economic strategy and tactics, there is a fear that China ultimately would fracture into competing regions, largely independent of any central authority -- a sort of economic warlordism reminiscent of the final days of previous Chinese dynasties.
Beijing's choice, then, is between taking no action against local governments, out of fears of triggering massive capital flight or inadvertently crippling investment and export activity, or rallying the rural masses -- which would be another avenue toward recentralizing control.
Thus, the central government has made a point of publicizing ever-more-dire statistics concerning rural and urban unrest. The Ministry of Public Security reported 87,000 cases of public disturbances in 2005, up from 74,000 in 2004 and 58,000 in 2003. (The numbers are high, but the definition of "disturbance" remains ambiguous.) The ministry has also warned of an imminent "period of pronounced contradictions within the people" in which "unpredictable factors affecting social stability will increase." Meanwhile, Wen has repeated that the cause of many protests is the confiscation of rural land for development and industrial projects -- projects that often are linked to corrupt local officials or are local initiatives that don't match the central priorities.
The message to the local leaders, of course, is that China's masses are on the move. In discussing the rural/urban gap, Chen Xiwen -- deputy director of the Office of the Central Financial Work Leading Group -- noted recently (and somewhat ominously) that 200 million farmers have left the countryside; Chen warned that "to increase the living standard of these farmers, China should spare no efforts to build the new socialist countryside." In essence, Beijing is threatening the local leaders with the spectre of a rural rising. The class struggle is on, and the farmers far outnumber the city-dwellers. The implicit message is that, for the safety of the city, the farmers must be funded and rural areas built up.
At the same time, Beijing is looking at a wholesale change in the local leadership, beginning with the Party secretaries and chiefs of China's 2,861 counties. New regulations -- not altogether welcomed by the existing Party cadre -- will require new county-level Party secretaries and chiefs to be around 45 years old and possess at least a bachelor's degree. These individuals would be less likely to have already built up their personal economic connections, and be more beholden to the central government for legitimacy and support. Beijing is also increasing supervision and admonition of Party and government officials.
But to make these changes last, Beijing needs to give the lower cadre some incentive to follow the central government's demands -- even if it means a reduction in local investments or a rise in local unemployment. Beijing must ensure that local officials are more closely tied to the central leadership in Beijing than to foreign investors and shareholders in Japan or the United States. For this, Beijing needs to make it utterly clear what risks the local government leaders face. Threats of prosecution and even the token executions of some officials have not worked, but the potential for more and larger social uprisings might.
This means Beijing needs to allow, if not subtly encourage, more localized demonstrations.
And that apparently is where Hu and Wen intend to go. The central government's response to stories of rural unrest has remained rather low-key thus far. In reference to the Dongzhou protests in December 2005, where at least three were killed when local security forces opened fire on the crowd, officials on the sidelines of the NPC session recently made it a point to say the officers in question are under detention and did not follow orders. In other uprisings, there even have been suggestions of sympathy from the center. In the cost-benefit analysis, Beijing apparently has determined that the risks of allowing the current trend of growing regionalized power to continue outweigh the risks of trying to manipulate popular sentiment against local officials.
This, perhaps more than anything, underscores the severity of the economic and governing problems facing China's central leadership.
The strategy of unleashing the rural masses, allowing and even subtly encouraging protests could quickly get out of hand. However, given the wide array of localized concerns, there is a natural disunity that could be expected to constrain protesters -- keeping demonstrations locally significant but nationally isolated. So long as protesters don't join across provinces and regions, so long as no interest is able to link the disparate demonstrations, the central leadership will retain some leeway to implement its policies.
But as history bears witness, any attempt to harness protests and mass movements is a very risky strategy indeed.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
China: Riding the Rural Tiger
By Rodger Baker
Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have been touting the "New Socialist Countryside" initiative. The initiative is being painted as a priority for reducing China's widening rural/urban gap in the near term, and for creating a more sustainable and robust economic future in the long term. The problems of rural economic reform, the social gap and rural unrest rank high on the agenda of China's central leadership and in the current session of the National People's Congress (NPC). Potential solutions to these problems form the heart of China's 11th five-year economic plan (2006-2010).
Over the past quarter century, China has made remarkable economic progress. By all accounts, its cities are booming: The bicycle-clogged alleys of the past are now traffic-clogged avenues, and construction cranes rise within cities as part of a seemingly endless rejuvenation and modernization campaign. Statistically speaking, China has never been stronger; gross domestic product (GDP) has risen from $200 billion in 1978 to $2.7 trillion in 2005. Foreign trade last year reached $1.4 trillion, with a trade surplus of nearly $102 billion. Exports accounted for 18 percent of the 9.9 percent GDP growth China reports for 2005. In the same year, the country utilized some $60.3 billion in foreign direct investment and sent $6.92 billion overseas in non-financial-sector investments. Foreign currency reserves at the end of 2005 registered $818.9 billion, rivaling Japan's.
But the growth has been anything but even. Urban growth continues to outpace rural growth, despite income increases across the board. In 2005, per capita disposable income reached $1,310 in urban areas, compared to just $405 in rural net income. Income disparity in 1984 was about a 2 to 1 ratio; now it is 3 to 1. Overall, the poorest 10 percent of China's citizens hold only 1 percent of the nation's wealth, and the wealthiest 10 percent claim 50 percent of the money. Even in urban areas, there are massive disparities: The poorest 20 percent of urban-dwellers control just 2.75 percent of private income; the top 20 percent control 60 percent of the total.
The gaps manifest in other ways as well. China's registered urban unemployment stands at 4.2 percent, but rural unemployment -- which isn't measured officially -- is anecdotally much higher, and even Beijing admits that some 200 million rural workers have migrated to cities recently in search of employment. That represents a substantial portion of the total rural population, which numbers 800 million to 900 million. In the cities, these migrants are treated as second-class citizens at best. In the countryside, they fare little better: Measures of education and health care are substantially lower. Moreover, there has been little legal recourse for farmers, who technically don't even own the land they work, when local officials confiscate the land for new industrial and housing projects.
The central government is well aware of these problems and, perhaps ironically, began issuing public cautions about social and economic tensions years before the international business community bothered to notice. Unrestrained economic growth no longer is viewed as a viable or sustainable option, and Beijing has begun to reassert more centralized control over economic development, with a particular emphasis on reducing the rural-urban gap.
But in seeking to address this problem, Beijing has exposed a deeper issue: endemic corruption and self-interest at the local and provincial levels of government. It is where economic disparity and government corruption intersect that social clashes occur most often.
Geography of Corruption
More than 25 years after its launch by Deng Xiaoping, China's economic reform and opening program has reached a critical juncture. Economic reforms have outpaced social and political reforms, and historical strains between the coast and inland regions, between urban and rural, and between the educated and less-educated are threatening the fabric of social stability and the central government's ability to rule. It is easy to see the frayed edges: Local protests turn violent where urban development projects eat away at the rural land. As the social instability moves closer to the coastal cities, there is a risk that China's competitiveness as an investment destination will be harmed, thereby triggering a spiral of economic and social degradation. Social instability also lays bare the growing rift between the central government and the local and regional leaders.
From a historical perspective, China's apparently stunning economic success stems from the pursuit and implementation of the quintessential Asian economic plan, which can be summed up as "growth for the sake of growth." Japan, South Korea, most of the Southeast Asian "tigers" and China all facilitated their economic "miracles" by focusing on the flow-through of capital, without regard for profits. As long as money was flowing in, there could be jobs. As long as there were jobs, there was a stabilizing social force. There was also an overall rise in personal wealth, though rarely was it evenly spread.
The coastal provinces and cities became the focal points for international investments in manufacturing, as investors exploited preferential government policies and cheap labor. The rural areas -- traditionally the backbone of China's economy -- and the petroleum and heavy industry of the northeast (which had been core to early Communist Chinese economics) faded in relevance. Though Beijing occasionally promoted more inland development and investment opportunities, geography and a lack of infrastructure made these unappealing to investors. The concentration of wealth in the coastal regions was a source of minor social tensions, but restrictions on internal migration kept a buffer between rural and urban populations, and social frictions remained comparatively low. These restrictions, however, have been only selectively enforced as of late, and many are being lifted.
The booming coastal economies created clear opportunities for corruption. As provincial and local Party cadre and political leaders became the gatekeepers for foreign investments, they also became mini-emperors of their own economic fiefdoms. Collusion and nepotism -- always a part of Chinese political society -- became even more entrenched as the money flowed in. With the central government fixated on growth, the best-performing local leaders were rewarded. The more foreign capital they were able to attract, the greater their personal influence and takings. These officials were not measured on efficiency or profitability, but on total flow-through of capital, rates of growth, employment and social stability.
This partly explains why attempts by the previous government to address the unequal development in China failed. Each time former President Jiang Zemin or former Premier Zhu Rongji tried to adjust policies and financial flows to the interior, there were strong objections from the wealthier coastal provinces. When they launched anti-corruption campaigns, the graft their investigators uncovered was deep and wide, and in some cases even threatened to reach up to the top echelons of power -- at times implicating Jiang himself. This only further entrenched the problem and removed incentives for Jiang and Zhu to act; after all, both were part of the so-called Shanghai clique and derived their political support from the coastal regions.
Under these two leaders, the government was much more successful in reducing the independence of the military, as neither Jiang nor Zhu had significant ties into the institution. But because the economic and political elite in the coastal regions were the source of the central leadership's power, they were able to repel reforms sought by the central government.
This all changed with the coming of Hu and Wen, both of whom are from rural areas. Wen, a perennial political survivor known for his ability to connect with the "common man," has been practically deified among rural-dwellers on account of his 10-year-old coat. That the premier still wears the same coat after 10 years is a clear sign (according to ample coverage by the news media and blog sites) of his care for the people, rather than for himself.
Herein lies the secret of Hu and Wen's strategy to regain control over the local and regional governments and Party officials. Whereas Jiang and Zhu tried using anti-corruption campaigns -- only to end up implicating themselves and their core supporters -- Hu and Wen are moving to harness the power of China's rural masses. Depending on which Chinese official you believe, this is a mass of humanity numbering from 700 million to 950 million people. Even at the low end of the estimates, however, rural-dwellers make up more than half of China's population -- and greatly outnumber the 300 million middle- and upper-class Chinese living mainly in Beijing and the coastal cities.
Harnessing the Masses
Chinese leaders have a long history of using the masses as weapons when challenges to central authority arise -- from the attempts to harness the Boxers at the turn of the 20th century to Mao's communist revolution to the Cultural Revolution. In each case, the process was chaotic and the outcomes were uncertain. Though Mao eventually succeeded in rallying the rural populace to effect his communist revolution, it simply served as a starting point for a new Chinese system. The use of the Boxers led to the dissolution of the Chinese dynastic system, and the Cultural Revolution wiped out whatever economic gains had been made, leaving China to start nearly from scratch once again.
What Hu and Wen intend to do is rally the masses to pressure local leaders into returning authority to the center. From this, centralized economic direction will, they hope, lead to more equalized development without significantly undermining the country's growth (though a slight slowing will be expected). Ultimately, the causes of social discontent would be mitigated and social frictions reduced as money is shifted to the interior.
This is a rather risky proposal, but China's core leadership sees this as the least distasteful among a poor selection of options. The initiative is being presented not as a disruptive social revolution, but as the duty of those who got rich first to assist those who trail them. The initial details of the official plan include greater spending in rural areas on infrastructure, education, healthcare and agriculture, with funding coming primarily from the urban centers. The plan already is meeting with mixed reactions from China's regional leaders -- and while the NPC is expected to approve the plan, that doesn't mean that they like it.
However, as the government's core leadership has pointed out ad nauseum over the past year, the Chinese economy is in a fragile state, and the rural/urban inequalities threaten to undo everything China has built up since the economic opening and reform program began. Unless the central government regains complete control over economic strategy and tactics, there is a fear that China ultimately would fracture into competing regions, largely independent of any central authority -- a sort of economic warlordism reminiscent of the final days of previous Chinese dynasties.
Beijing's choice, then, is between taking no action against local governments, out of fears of triggering massive capital flight or inadvertently crippling investment and export activity, or rallying the rural masses -- which would be another avenue toward recentralizing control.
Thus, the central government has made a point of publicizing ever-more-dire statistics concerning rural and urban unrest. The Ministry of Public Security reported 87,000 cases of public disturbances in 2005, up from 74,000 in 2004 and 58,000 in 2003. (The numbers are high, but the definition of "disturbance" remains ambiguous.) The ministry has also warned of an imminent "period of pronounced contradictions within the people" in which "unpredictable factors affecting social stability will increase." Meanwhile, Wen has repeated that the cause of many protests is the confiscation of rural land for development and industrial projects -- projects that often are linked to corrupt local officials or are local initiatives that don't match the central priorities.
The message to the local leaders, of course, is that China's masses are on the move. In discussing the rural/urban gap, Chen Xiwen -- deputy director of the Office of the Central Financial Work Leading Group -- noted recently (and somewhat ominously) that 200 million farmers have left the countryside; Chen warned that "to increase the living standard of these farmers, China should spare no efforts to build the new socialist countryside." In essence, Beijing is threatening the local leaders with the spectre of a rural rising. The class struggle is on, and the farmers far outnumber the city-dwellers. The implicit message is that, for the safety of the city, the farmers must be funded and rural areas built up.
At the same time, Beijing is looking at a wholesale change in the local leadership, beginning with the Party secretaries and chiefs of China's 2,861 counties. New regulations -- not altogether welcomed by the existing Party cadre -- will require new county-level Party secretaries and chiefs to be around 45 years old and possess at least a bachelor's degree. These individuals would be less likely to have already built up their personal economic connections, and be more beholden to the central government for legitimacy and support. Beijing is also increasing supervision and admonition of Party and government officials.
But to make these changes last, Beijing needs to give the lower cadre some incentive to follow the central government's demands -- even if it means a reduction in local investments or a rise in local unemployment. Beijing must ensure that local officials are more closely tied to the central leadership in Beijing than to foreign investors and shareholders in Japan or the United States. For this, Beijing needs to make it utterly clear what risks the local government leaders face. Threats of prosecution and even the token executions of some officials have not worked, but the potential for more and larger social uprisings might.
This means Beijing needs to allow, if not subtly encourage, more localized demonstrations.
And that apparently is where Hu and Wen intend to go. The central government's response to stories of rural unrest has remained rather low-key thus far. In reference to the Dongzhou protests in December 2005, where at least three were killed when local security forces opened fire on the crowd, officials on the sidelines of the NPC session recently made it a point to say the officers in question are under detention and did not follow orders. In other uprisings, there even have been suggestions of sympathy from the center. In the cost-benefit analysis, Beijing apparently has determined that the risks of allowing the current trend of growing regionalized power to continue outweigh the risks of trying to manipulate popular sentiment against local officials.
This, perhaps more than anything, underscores the severity of the economic and governing problems facing China's central leadership.
The strategy of unleashing the rural masses, allowing and even subtly encouraging protests could quickly get out of hand. However, given the wide array of localized concerns, there is a natural disunity that could be expected to constrain protesters -- keeping demonstrations locally significant but nationally isolated. So long as protesters don't join across provinces and regions, so long as no interest is able to link the disparate demonstrations, the central leadership will retain some leeway to implement its policies.
But as history bears witness, any attempt to harness protests and mass movements is a very risky strategy indeed.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
terça-feira, março 07, 2006
52) Churchill: o famoso discurso da "cortina de ferro"
Remembering Winston Churchill
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-burnett/remembering-winston-churc_b_16852.html
Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of Winston Churchill's famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. In this address, Churchill coined the phrase, "iron curtain," and foresaw the Cold War that would consume much of the free world's attention for the next forty years. If Churchill were alive today, undoubtedly he would deliver another stirring oration warning of the desperate circumstances we find ourselves in-the prospect of global Jihad.
On March 5th, 1946, Churchill reminded his audience that he'd tried to prevent World War II. "Last time I saw it all coming and I cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention." He remembered, "There never was a war in history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honored today; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool."
Now we teeter at the edge of another whirlpool, stirred by religious extremism. A vortex that swirls faster every day because of the preaching of radical Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Each of the great desert religions has a fanatical segment that while seeking to bring proselytes closer to God condemns unbelievers to eternal damnation.
Few of us believe that the global war looming before us may be prevented "without the firing of a single shot." Nonetheless, we can keep it from spreading throughout the world. It is still possible to step away from the abyss. For a time, after 9/11, the whole world was on the side of the United States. Some thought that the savagery of the attacks had proven, once and for all, the need for global community. Citizens in every country wanted to help America track down Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda assassins. We united to hunt them down in Afghanistan.
The coalition failed for three reasons. It quickly became clear that the US-the Bush Administration-insisted on running the operation, not a loosely structured international military command or the United Nations. Moreover, in the days that stretched into weeks and months, it became apparent that George Bush, and his cronies, had no use for international organizations. Their attitude stands in stark contrast to the philosophy that Churchill expressed in that Memorable March 5th speech. Winston believed in the UN. He argued that the way to prevent a global war was by putting pressure on Russia, "under the general authority of the United Nations Organization and by the maintenance of that good understanding through many peaceful years, by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and all its connections." Churchill, along with FDR and American presidents prior to Reagan and Bush, believed in the value of global community.
The second reason that the coalition failed was because of a series of dreadful decisions made by the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the commander of our Afghanistan campaign, Tommy Franks. Among these was over-reliance on "smart" bombs-most of which missed their targets-and the decision to rely upon Afghani mercenaries at the critical point in the search for Bin Laden. Mistakes arising from the arrogance of power.
The third reason for the failure was the invasion of Iraq. Churchill famously called a member of the opposition, "the boneless wonder." If Winston had been alive on March 19, 2003, no doubt he would have described George W. Bush as "the brainless wonder." The decision to invade Iraq was such a ghastly blunder that even Republicans acknowledge it. Regan-era National Security Agency director, Lieutenant General William Odom, called it "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history." Archconservative, William F. Buckley, Jr., recently acknowledged, "The American objective in Iraq has failed."
When we stand back and look at the string of dreadful decisions made by the Bush Administration since 9/11, one thing becomes ominously obvious: the President and his advisers have no talent for protecting America and building a safer world. The only thing they care about is politics.
Bush failed to capture Osama Bin Laden or curtail Al Qaeda. Moreover, his bumbling has made Bin Laden the folk hero of the Arab street and bolstered terrorist recruiting. Instead of capitalizing on the good will proffered America, after 9/11, George has turned the rest of the world against us. Dubya has ruptured the historic alliances that Churchill touted. The Bush Administration has fanned the fires of religious extremism, both within the U.S. and abroad. Unbelievably, they have failed to take steps to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction throughout the world. Bush has failed to take elementary steps to protect America, such as real port security. Even worse, his thoughtless actions have fueled the flames of Jihad.
The grievous inadequacy of the Bush Administration has brought America to the brink of a horrendous world war. A cataclysm involving religious fanatics wielding weapons of mass destruction from which none of us will find sanctuary.
As we think back to Churchill's speech, sixty years ago, we are reminded of the importance of that illusive quality-leadership. America requires a real leader in these perilous times. Winston where are you when we need you?
----
Bob Burnett, Berkeley, Calif.
bburnett@igc.org
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-burnett/remembering-winston-churc_b_16852.html
Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of Winston Churchill's famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. In this address, Churchill coined the phrase, "iron curtain," and foresaw the Cold War that would consume much of the free world's attention for the next forty years. If Churchill were alive today, undoubtedly he would deliver another stirring oration warning of the desperate circumstances we find ourselves in-the prospect of global Jihad.
On March 5th, 1946, Churchill reminded his audience that he'd tried to prevent World War II. "Last time I saw it all coming and I cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention." He remembered, "There never was a war in history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honored today; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool."
Now we teeter at the edge of another whirlpool, stirred by religious extremism. A vortex that swirls faster every day because of the preaching of radical Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Each of the great desert religions has a fanatical segment that while seeking to bring proselytes closer to God condemns unbelievers to eternal damnation.
Few of us believe that the global war looming before us may be prevented "without the firing of a single shot." Nonetheless, we can keep it from spreading throughout the world. It is still possible to step away from the abyss. For a time, after 9/11, the whole world was on the side of the United States. Some thought that the savagery of the attacks had proven, once and for all, the need for global community. Citizens in every country wanted to help America track down Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda assassins. We united to hunt them down in Afghanistan.
The coalition failed for three reasons. It quickly became clear that the US-the Bush Administration-insisted on running the operation, not a loosely structured international military command or the United Nations. Moreover, in the days that stretched into weeks and months, it became apparent that George Bush, and his cronies, had no use for international organizations. Their attitude stands in stark contrast to the philosophy that Churchill expressed in that Memorable March 5th speech. Winston believed in the UN. He argued that the way to prevent a global war was by putting pressure on Russia, "under the general authority of the United Nations Organization and by the maintenance of that good understanding through many peaceful years, by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and all its connections." Churchill, along with FDR and American presidents prior to Reagan and Bush, believed in the value of global community.
The second reason that the coalition failed was because of a series of dreadful decisions made by the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the commander of our Afghanistan campaign, Tommy Franks. Among these was over-reliance on "smart" bombs-most of which missed their targets-and the decision to rely upon Afghani mercenaries at the critical point in the search for Bin Laden. Mistakes arising from the arrogance of power.
The third reason for the failure was the invasion of Iraq. Churchill famously called a member of the opposition, "the boneless wonder." If Winston had been alive on March 19, 2003, no doubt he would have described George W. Bush as "the brainless wonder." The decision to invade Iraq was such a ghastly blunder that even Republicans acknowledge it. Regan-era National Security Agency director, Lieutenant General William Odom, called it "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history." Archconservative, William F. Buckley, Jr., recently acknowledged, "The American objective in Iraq has failed."
When we stand back and look at the string of dreadful decisions made by the Bush Administration since 9/11, one thing becomes ominously obvious: the President and his advisers have no talent for protecting America and building a safer world. The only thing they care about is politics.
Bush failed to capture Osama Bin Laden or curtail Al Qaeda. Moreover, his bumbling has made Bin Laden the folk hero of the Arab street and bolstered terrorist recruiting. Instead of capitalizing on the good will proffered America, after 9/11, George has turned the rest of the world against us. Dubya has ruptured the historic alliances that Churchill touted. The Bush Administration has fanned the fires of religious extremism, both within the U.S. and abroad. Unbelievably, they have failed to take steps to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction throughout the world. Bush has failed to take elementary steps to protect America, such as real port security. Even worse, his thoughtless actions have fueled the flames of Jihad.
The grievous inadequacy of the Bush Administration has brought America to the brink of a horrendous world war. A cataclysm involving religious fanatics wielding weapons of mass destruction from which none of us will find sanctuary.
As we think back to Churchill's speech, sixty years ago, we are reminded of the importance of that illusive quality-leadership. America requires a real leader in these perilous times. Winston where are you when we need you?
----
Bob Burnett, Berkeley, Calif.
bburnett@igc.org
sexta-feira, março 03, 2006
51) O mercado financeiro, cem anos atrás...
Financial Times, February 3, 2006
Times were braver a century ago
By Joanna Chung
The flow of money into emerging markets in recent years pales in comparison to the proportion of funds heading there a century ago. "The surprise for emerging markets is not that investment flows are too large," says Richard Cookson, strategist at HSBC. "By historical standards, they are extraordinarily meagre."
He says the average 19th-century investor in Britain was likely to have had 25 per cent of his money in emerging markets. By comparison, US institutional investors in recent years have had barely 10 per cent invested in foreign securities, with a fraction of that devoted to emerging markets.
Capital flows in the late 19th century were also more efficient. "The trend towards globalisation was more effective in terms of capital allocation because money was flowing in the right direction, from developed markets to the emerging markets," says Mike Buchanan of Goldman Sachs. "Now the global financial system has things the wrong way round, with money flowing from places like China to the US."
The value of emerging market debt traded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was also high, according to research by Goldman. By 1905, the total value of emerging market debt traded in London was about £1bn, equivalent to about 12 per cent of world gross domestic product. This compares with $1,200bn,or 2.7 per cent of world GDP, in 1999. The recent allure of emerging markets has seen debt trading value jump to about $5,500bn last year - back to 12 per cent of global GDP, so restoring the position of 100 years ago.
A century ago the UK accounted for just under half of all cross-border investments of more than a year's duration, says Mr Buchanan. Of those British funds, about 30 per cent was invested in foreign government debt, 40 per cent in railways, 10 per cent in mining and 5 per cent in utilities. The US was a big emerging market. Other countries attracting funds included Australia, Egypt, Hungary, Mexico, Russia and Turkey.
Default was common but the extra yield compensated for the plentiful risks. Investors bought railway bonds from Argentina and Bolivia, some of which were defaulted on; Brazil sold bonds secured by export taxes and railway revenues to pay for trams and electricity lines and even launched an offering to pay for the levelling of a mountain. Most of the world's railway systems were built with British and other European investors' capital.
The heavy flow was halted by war, protectionism and exchange controls. The revival in investor enthusiasm has been a long time coming.
Times were braver a century ago
By Joanna Chung
The flow of money into emerging markets in recent years pales in comparison to the proportion of funds heading there a century ago. "The surprise for emerging markets is not that investment flows are too large," says Richard Cookson, strategist at HSBC. "By historical standards, they are extraordinarily meagre."
He says the average 19th-century investor in Britain was likely to have had 25 per cent of his money in emerging markets. By comparison, US institutional investors in recent years have had barely 10 per cent invested in foreign securities, with a fraction of that devoted to emerging markets.
Capital flows in the late 19th century were also more efficient. "The trend towards globalisation was more effective in terms of capital allocation because money was flowing in the right direction, from developed markets to the emerging markets," says Mike Buchanan of Goldman Sachs. "Now the global financial system has things the wrong way round, with money flowing from places like China to the US."
The value of emerging market debt traded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was also high, according to research by Goldman. By 1905, the total value of emerging market debt traded in London was about £1bn, equivalent to about 12 per cent of world gross domestic product. This compares with $1,200bn,or 2.7 per cent of world GDP, in 1999. The recent allure of emerging markets has seen debt trading value jump to about $5,500bn last year - back to 12 per cent of global GDP, so restoring the position of 100 years ago.
A century ago the UK accounted for just under half of all cross-border investments of more than a year's duration, says Mr Buchanan. Of those British funds, about 30 per cent was invested in foreign government debt, 40 per cent in railways, 10 per cent in mining and 5 per cent in utilities. The US was a big emerging market. Other countries attracting funds included Australia, Egypt, Hungary, Mexico, Russia and Turkey.
Default was common but the extra yield compensated for the plentiful risks. Investors bought railway bonds from Argentina and Bolivia, some of which were defaulted on; Brazil sold bonds secured by export taxes and railway revenues to pay for trams and electricity lines and even launched an offering to pay for the levelling of a mountain. Most of the world's railway systems were built with British and other European investors' capital.
The heavy flow was halted by war, protectionism and exchange controls. The revival in investor enthusiasm has been a long time coming.
50) China, o lado negro do grande crescimento econômico
The Dark Side of China’s Rise
By Minxin Pei
FOREIGN POLICY
March/April 2006
China’s economic boom has dazzled investors and captivated the world. But beyond the new high-rises and churning factories lie rampant corruption, vast waste, and an elite with little interest in making things better. Forget political reform. China’s future will be decay, not democracy.
The only thing rising faster than China is the hype about China. In January, the People’s Republic’s gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded that of Britain and France, making China the world’s fourth-largest economy. In December, it was announced that China replaced the United States as the world’s largest exporter of technology goods. Many experts predict that the Chinese economy will be second only to the United States by 2020, and possibly surpass it by 2050.
Western investors hail China’s strong economic fundamentals—notably a high savings rate, huge labor pool, and powerful work ethic—and willingly gloss over its imperfections. Businesspeople talk about China’s being simultaneously the world’s greatest manufacturer and its greatest market. Private equity firms are scouring the Middle Kingdom for acquisitions. Chinese Internet companies are fetching dot-com-era prices on the NASDAQ. Some of the world’s leading financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citibank, and HSBC, have bet billions on the country’s financial future by acquiring minority stakes in China’s state-controlled banks, even though many of them are technically insolvent. Not to be left out, every global automobile giant has built or is planning new facilities in China, despite a flooded market and plunging profit margins.
And why shouldn’t they believe the hype? The record of China’s growth over the past two decades has proved pessimists wrong and optimists not optimistic enough. But before we all start learning Chinese and marveling at the accomplishments of the Chinese Communist Party, we might want to pause for a moment. Upon close examination, China’s record loses some of its luster. China’s economic performance since 1979, for example, is actually less impressive than that of its East Asian neighbors, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, during comparable periods of growth. Its banking system, which costs Beijing about 30 percent of annual GDP in bailouts, is saddled with nonperforming loans and is probably the most fragile in Asia. The comparison with India is especially striking. In six major industrial sectors (ranging from autos to telecom), from 1999 to 2003, Indian companies delivered rates of return on investment that were 80 to 200 percent higher than their Chinese counterparts. The often breathless conventional wisdom on China’s economic reform overlooks major flaws that render many predictions about China’s trajectory misleading, if not downright hazardous.
Behind the glowing headlines are fundamental frailties rooted in the Chinese neo-Leninist state. Unlike Maoism, neo-Leninism blends one-party rule and state control of key sectors of the economy with partial market reforms and an end to self-imposed isolation from the world economy. The Maoist state preached egalitarianism and relied on the loyalty of workers and peasants. The neo-Leninist state practices elitism, draws its support from technocrats, the military, and the police, and co-opts new social elites (professionals and private entrepreneurs) and foreign capital—all vilified under Maoism. Neo-Leninism has rendered the ruling Chinese Communist Party more resilient but has also generated self-destructive forces.
To most Western observers, China’s economic success obscures the predatory characteristics of its neo-Leninist state. But Beijing’s brand of authoritarian politics is spawning a dangerous mix of crony capitalism, rampant corruption, and widening inequality. Dreams that the country’s economic liberalization will someday lead to political reform remain distant. Indeed, if current trends continue, China’s political system is more likely to experience decay than democracy. It’s true that China’s recent economic achievements have given the party a new vibrancy. Yet the very policies that the party adopted to generate high economic growth are compounding the political and social ills that threaten its long-term survival.
Command and Control
After a quarter century of gradual economic reform, has China succeeded in transforming its old command economy into a genuine market economy? Not nearly as well as most people would guess. Although China was one of the earliest socialist economies to begin serious reform, recent data on the country’s regulation, international trade, fiscal policy, and legal structure place China in the bottom third of 127 countries surveyed for economic freedom, below most Eastern European countries, India and Mexico, and all of its East Asian neighbors, save Burma and Vietnam.
The Chinese state remains deeply entrenched in the economy. According to official data for 2003, the state directly accounted for 38 percent of the country’s GDP and employed 85 million people (about one third of the urban workforce). For its part, the formal private sector in urban areas employed only 67 million people. A research report by the financial firm UBS argues that the private sector in China accounts for no more than 30 percent of the economy. These figures are startling even for Asia, where there is a tradition of heavy state involvement in the economy. State-owned enterprises in most Asian countries contribute about 5 percent of GDP. In India, traditionally considered a socialist economy, state-owned firms generate less than 7 percent of GDP.
But China’s tentacles are even more securely wrapped around the economy than these figures suggest. First, Beijing continues to own the bulk of capital. In 2003, the state controlled $1.2 trillion worth of capital stock, or 56 percent of the country’s fixed industrial assets. Second, the state remains, as befits a quintessentially Leninist regime, securely in control of the “commanding heights” of the economy: It is either a monopolist or a dominant player in the most important sectors, including financial services, banking, telecommunications, energy, steel, automobiles, natural resources, and transportation. It protects its monopoly profits in these sectors by blocking private domestic firms and foreign companies from entering the market (although in a few sectors, such as steel, telecom, and automobiles, there is competition among state firms). Third, the government maintains tight control over most investment projects through the power to issue long-term bank credit and grant land-use rights.
China’s business cycle is therefore driven by Beijing. Private-sector firms have very limited access to finance or new markets. The state even dominates many ostensibly deregulated sectors, such as the brewing industry, the retail sector, and textiles. Of the 66 publicly traded retailers in the country, only one is private. There are only 40 private firms among the 1,520 Chinese companies listed on domestic and foreign exchanges.
The Parasitic State
To many observers, Beijing’s tight grip on the Chinese economy means only that its reform process is incomplete. As China continues to open itself, they predict, state control will ease and market forces will clear away inefficient industries and clean up state institutions. The strong belief in gradual but inexorable economic liberalization often has a political corollary: that market forces will eventually produce civil liberties and political pluralism.
It’s a comforting thought. Yet these optimistic visions tend to ignore the neo-Leninist regime’s desperate need for unfettered access to economic spoils. Few authoritarian regimes can maintain power through coercion alone. Most mix coercion with patronage to secure support from key constituencies, such as the bureaucracy, the military, and business interests. In other words, an authoritarian regime imperils its capacity for political control if it embraces full economic liberalization. Most authoritarian regimes know that much, and none better than Beijing.
Today, Beijing oversees a vast patronage system that secures the loyalty of supporters and allocates privileges to favored groups. The party appoints 81 percent of the chief executives of state-owned enterprises and 56 percent of all senior corporate executives. The corporate reforms implemented since the late 1990s—designed to turn wholly state-owned firms into shareholding companies—haven’t made a dent in patronage. In large- and medium-sized state enterprises (ostensibly converted into shareholding companies, some of which are even traded on overseas stock markets), the Communist Party secretaries and the chairmen of the board were the same person about half the time. In 70 percent of the 6,275 large- and medium-sized state enterprises classified as “corporatized” as of 2001, the members of the party committee were members of the board of directors. All told, 5.3 million party officials—about 8 percent of its total membership and 16 percent of its urban members—held executive positions in state enterprises in 2003, the last year for which figures were available.
An incestuous relationship between the state and major industries can doom developing countries, and China is more susceptible than most. The combination of authoritarian rule and the state’s economic dominance has bred a virulent form of crony capitalism, as the ruling elites convert their political power into economic wealth and privilege at the expense of equity and efficiency. The state’s economic dominance preserves systemic economic inefficiency as scarce resources are funneled to local elites and bureaucratic constituencies. The World Bank estimates that, between 1991 and 2000, almost a third of investment decisions in China were misguided. The Chinese central bank’s research shows that politically directed lending was responsible for 60 percent of bad bank loans in 2001–02. The problem persists today. Chinese economic planners revealed in early 2006 that 11 major capital-intensive manufacturing industries were overproducing. For example, the country’s steel industry, the world’s largest, has 116 million tons (or about 30 percent) of excess capacity.
State enterprises are also miserably unprofitable. In 2003, a boom year, their median rate of return on assets was a measly 1.5 percent. More than 35 percent of state enterprises lose money and 1 in 6 has more debts than assets. China is the only country in history to have simultaneously achieved record economic growth and a record number of nonperforming bank loans.
Party membership and business acumen do not often go together. Because of the party’s fixation with high growth, government officials are rewarded for delivering, or appearing to deliver, precisely that. This incentive structure fuels a massive misallocation of capital to “image projects” (such as new factories, luxury shopping malls, recreational facilities, and unnecessary infrastructure) that burnish local officials’ records and strengthen their chances of promotion. The results of these mistakes—gleaming office complexes, industrial parks, landscaped highways, and public squares—tend to impress Western visitors, who view them as further proof of China’s economic prowess.
The Chinese economy is not merely inefficient; it has also fallen victim to crony capitalism with Chinese characteristics—the marriage between unchecked power and illicit wealth. And corruption is worst where the hand of the state is strongest. The most corrupt sectors in China, such as power generation, tobacco, banking, financial services, and infrastructure, are all state-controlled monopolies. None of that is unprecedented, of course. Tycoons in Russia, after all, have looted the state’s natural resources. China, at least, boasts genuine private entrepreneurs who have built prosperous companies. But China’s politically connected tycoons have cashed in on China’s real estate boom; nearly half of Forbes’ list of the 100 richest individuals in China in 2004 were real estate developers.
Various indicators, pieced together from official sources, suggest endemic graft within the state. The number of “large-sum cases” (those involving monetary amounts greater than $6,000) nearly doubled between 1992 and 2002, indicating that more wealth is being looted by corrupt officials. The rot appears to be spreading up the ranks, as more and more senior officials have been ensnared. The number of officials at the county level and above prosecuted by the government rose from 1,386 in 1992 to 2,925 in 2002.
An optimist might believe that these figures reveal stronger enforcement rather than metastasizing corruption, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Dishonest officials today face little risk of serious punishment. On average, 140,000 party officials and members were caught in corruption scandals each year in the 1990s, and 5.6 percent of these were criminally prosecuted. In 2004, 170,850 party officials and members were implicated, but only 4,915 (or 2.9 percent) were subject to criminal prosecution. The culture of official impunity is thriving in China.
What’s worse, corruption is now assuming forms normally associated with regime decay. Corruption involving large numbers of officials used to be rare. Now it’s rampant. Regional data suggest that large-scale corruption rings account for 30 to 60 percent of all the cases of graft uncovered by authorities. In some of the worst instances, entire provincial, municipal, and county governments were found to be tainted. In Heilongjiang Province, a corruption scandal involved more than 400 local officials, including the former governor, the former organizational chief of the party’s provincial committee, a vice governor, the chief prosecutor, the president of the provincial high court, and eight of the province’s 13 party bosses. According to official reports, in Shenyang (the capital of Liaoning Province), Fuzhou (the capital of Fujian Province), and more than 30 other counties and prefectures, groups of senior local officials, including party chiefs and mayors, have been on the payroll of organized gangs involved in murder, extortion, gambling, and prostitution.
As ominous as the corruption itself is what these scandals are beginning to reveal about the government’s legitimacy. In their confessions, corrupt officials often blame their misdeeds on a loss of faith in communism. There is anecdotal evidence that senior party officials have taken to consulting fortune-tellers about their political careers. The ruling elite in China, it appears, is drifting and insecure. Fearful about what the future may hold, some officials do not want to wait even a few years to turn their power into wealth. In 2002, almost 20 percent of the officials prosecuted for bribery and nearly 30 percent of those punished for abuse of power were younger than 35. In Henan Province in 2003, 43 percent of local party bosses caught up in corruption were between 40 and 50 years old (as compared with 32 percent older than 50). China has seen its future leaders, and a disproportionate number of them are on the take.
The Two Chinas
With elites cashing in quickly, ordinary Chinese are falling behind. Estimates from various sources, including the World Bank and the Chinese government, suggest that income inequality has increased at least 50 percent since the late 1970s, making China one of the most unequal societies in Asia. A recent study reports that less than 1 percent of Chinese households control more than 60 percent of the country’s wealth (by comparison, 5 percent of the households in the United States own 60 percent of the wealth). Rising inequality, to be sure, is not unusual in countries moving toward a market economy, but China’s neo-Leninist system, warped incentives, and elitist policies have amplified the trend.
A generation ago, the offspring of the ruling elite took up positions in the government or military; today, they go into business. The social ramifications of their self-dealing are particularly evident in real estate, where peasants regularly earn less than 5 percent of the value of their land while developers pocket 60 percent, with the remainder going into local government coffers. Privatization, too, offers insiders a chance to hit it rich by gobbling up state assets on the cheap. A recent study showed that 60 percent of privatized state enterprises were sold to their managers. As a result, 30 percent of all private-firm owners are now party members.
Meanwhile, basic services and good governance for ordinary Chinese are falling further behind. According to the World Bank, China’s governance ranks in the bottom half of all the countries in the world. China underinvests in crucial social services, especially education and public health. Government expenditures on education fell nearly 20 percent as a share of total education spending in the 1990s. In rural areas, home of China’s poorest citizens, 78 percent of the education budget must be raised from peasants through local taxation and fees, while Beijing provides only 1 percent of the funding for rural education.
In public health, the consequences of misspending are even more severe. Government money, which accounted for 36 percent of all health expenditures in the 1980s, plunged to less than 15 percent by 2000. China has hospitals and equipment, and its per capita spending is higher than comparable developing countries. But these resources are among the most unequally distributed in the world. The World Health Organization rated the fairness of the Chinese healthcare system below all countries except Brazil and Burma. According to China’s own Ministry of Health, two thirds of the population lacks any type of health insurance, and about half of the sick do not seek professional medical treatment at all.
Democracy Delayed
Rapid economic growth has not yet produced China’s much-anticipated political pluralism. Perhaps, some observers speculate, China is still too poor to afford democracy. But with a per capita income of nearly $1,500 ($4,500 if you consider people’s purchasing power), China is richer than many poor democracies. It’s not poverty that is holding up democracy; it’s a neo-Leninist state and the crony capitalism it fosters.
In part, democracy itself has been a victim of the country’s economic expansion. However flawed and mismanaged, the country’s rapid growth has bolstered Beijing’s legitimacy and reduced pressure on its ruling elites to liberalize. Democratic transitions in developing countries are often triggered by economic crises blamed on the incompetence and mismanagement of the ancien régime. China hasn’t experienced that crisis yet. Meanwhile, the riches available to the ruling class tend to drown any movement for democratic reform from within the elite. Political power has become more valuable because it can be converted into wealth and privilege unimaginable in the past. At the moment, China’s economic growth is having a perverse effect on democratization: It makes the ruling elite even more reluctant to part with power.
Lavish government spending on law and order helps to ensure that power-sharing won’t be necessary in the near future. Since the Tiananmen Square tragedy, the party has invested billions in beefing up the paramilitary police force (the People’s Armed Police) that has been deployed in suppressing internal unrest. To counter the threat posed by the information revolution, and especially the Internet, the Chinese government has blended technological savvy with regulatory might. The Chinese “Internet police,” officially known as the Ministry of Public Security’s Internet and Security Supervision Bureau, is reportedly more than 30,000 strong. Its Beijing branch proudly claimed that, in 2002, it participated in a multi-agency exercise to see whether the government could rid the Internet of “harmful content” within 48 hours of the onset of an emergency. (During the exercise, all “harmful content” was removed in 19 hours.) The party’s refined strategy of “selective repression” targets only those who openly challenge its authority while leaving the general public alone. China is one of the few authoritarian states where homosexuality and cross-dressing are permitted, but political dissent is not. Domestic opposition groups and individuals who might challenge the party’s authority are left isolated and powerless.
The emerging social elite, by contrast, is co-opted and coddled. The party showers the urban intelligentsia, professionals, and private entrepreneurs with economic perks, professional honors, and political access. For example, nationwide, 145,000 designated experts, or about 8 percent of senior professionals, received “special government stipends” (monthly salary supplements) in 2004; tens of thousands of former college professors have been recruited into the party and promoted to senior government positions. At least for now, the party’s charm campaign is working: The social groups that are normally the forces of democratization have been politically neutralized.
China’s neo-Leninist regime has formidable resources—but much more serious defects. State-directed investment, made to secure the political loyalty of key constituencies and advance personal careers, will prevent China from realizing its economic potential. The corruption of the state will likely deepen. The deterioration of the public health infrastructure and education systems will generate social tensions and mass alienation, thus eroding the party’s base of support and increasing its vulnerability to the economic or political shocks that will inevitably come.
China has already paid a heavy price for the flaws of its political system and the corruption it has spawned. Its new leaders, though aware of the depth of the decay, are taking only modest steps to correct it. For the moment, China’s strong economic fundamentals and the boundless energy of its people have concealed and offset its poor governance, but they will carry China only so far. Someday soon, we will know whether such a flawed system can pass a stress test: a severe economic shock, political upheaval, a public health crisis, or an ecological catastrophe. China may be rising, but no one really knows whether it can fly.
Minxin Pei is senior associate and director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
By Minxin Pei
FOREIGN POLICY
March/April 2006
China’s economic boom has dazzled investors and captivated the world. But beyond the new high-rises and churning factories lie rampant corruption, vast waste, and an elite with little interest in making things better. Forget political reform. China’s future will be decay, not democracy.
The only thing rising faster than China is the hype about China. In January, the People’s Republic’s gross domestic product (GDP) exceeded that of Britain and France, making China the world’s fourth-largest economy. In December, it was announced that China replaced the United States as the world’s largest exporter of technology goods. Many experts predict that the Chinese economy will be second only to the United States by 2020, and possibly surpass it by 2050.
Western investors hail China’s strong economic fundamentals—notably a high savings rate, huge labor pool, and powerful work ethic—and willingly gloss over its imperfections. Businesspeople talk about China’s being simultaneously the world’s greatest manufacturer and its greatest market. Private equity firms are scouring the Middle Kingdom for acquisitions. Chinese Internet companies are fetching dot-com-era prices on the NASDAQ. Some of the world’s leading financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citibank, and HSBC, have bet billions on the country’s financial future by acquiring minority stakes in China’s state-controlled banks, even though many of them are technically insolvent. Not to be left out, every global automobile giant has built or is planning new facilities in China, despite a flooded market and plunging profit margins.
And why shouldn’t they believe the hype? The record of China’s growth over the past two decades has proved pessimists wrong and optimists not optimistic enough. But before we all start learning Chinese and marveling at the accomplishments of the Chinese Communist Party, we might want to pause for a moment. Upon close examination, China’s record loses some of its luster. China’s economic performance since 1979, for example, is actually less impressive than that of its East Asian neighbors, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, during comparable periods of growth. Its banking system, which costs Beijing about 30 percent of annual GDP in bailouts, is saddled with nonperforming loans and is probably the most fragile in Asia. The comparison with India is especially striking. In six major industrial sectors (ranging from autos to telecom), from 1999 to 2003, Indian companies delivered rates of return on investment that were 80 to 200 percent higher than their Chinese counterparts. The often breathless conventional wisdom on China’s economic reform overlooks major flaws that render many predictions about China’s trajectory misleading, if not downright hazardous.
Behind the glowing headlines are fundamental frailties rooted in the Chinese neo-Leninist state. Unlike Maoism, neo-Leninism blends one-party rule and state control of key sectors of the economy with partial market reforms and an end to self-imposed isolation from the world economy. The Maoist state preached egalitarianism and relied on the loyalty of workers and peasants. The neo-Leninist state practices elitism, draws its support from technocrats, the military, and the police, and co-opts new social elites (professionals and private entrepreneurs) and foreign capital—all vilified under Maoism. Neo-Leninism has rendered the ruling Chinese Communist Party more resilient but has also generated self-destructive forces.
To most Western observers, China’s economic success obscures the predatory characteristics of its neo-Leninist state. But Beijing’s brand of authoritarian politics is spawning a dangerous mix of crony capitalism, rampant corruption, and widening inequality. Dreams that the country’s economic liberalization will someday lead to political reform remain distant. Indeed, if current trends continue, China’s political system is more likely to experience decay than democracy. It’s true that China’s recent economic achievements have given the party a new vibrancy. Yet the very policies that the party adopted to generate high economic growth are compounding the political and social ills that threaten its long-term survival.
Command and Control
After a quarter century of gradual economic reform, has China succeeded in transforming its old command economy into a genuine market economy? Not nearly as well as most people would guess. Although China was one of the earliest socialist economies to begin serious reform, recent data on the country’s regulation, international trade, fiscal policy, and legal structure place China in the bottom third of 127 countries surveyed for economic freedom, below most Eastern European countries, India and Mexico, and all of its East Asian neighbors, save Burma and Vietnam.
The Chinese state remains deeply entrenched in the economy. According to official data for 2003, the state directly accounted for 38 percent of the country’s GDP and employed 85 million people (about one third of the urban workforce). For its part, the formal private sector in urban areas employed only 67 million people. A research report by the financial firm UBS argues that the private sector in China accounts for no more than 30 percent of the economy. These figures are startling even for Asia, where there is a tradition of heavy state involvement in the economy. State-owned enterprises in most Asian countries contribute about 5 percent of GDP. In India, traditionally considered a socialist economy, state-owned firms generate less than 7 percent of GDP.
But China’s tentacles are even more securely wrapped around the economy than these figures suggest. First, Beijing continues to own the bulk of capital. In 2003, the state controlled $1.2 trillion worth of capital stock, or 56 percent of the country’s fixed industrial assets. Second, the state remains, as befits a quintessentially Leninist regime, securely in control of the “commanding heights” of the economy: It is either a monopolist or a dominant player in the most important sectors, including financial services, banking, telecommunications, energy, steel, automobiles, natural resources, and transportation. It protects its monopoly profits in these sectors by blocking private domestic firms and foreign companies from entering the market (although in a few sectors, such as steel, telecom, and automobiles, there is competition among state firms). Third, the government maintains tight control over most investment projects through the power to issue long-term bank credit and grant land-use rights.
China’s business cycle is therefore driven by Beijing. Private-sector firms have very limited access to finance or new markets. The state even dominates many ostensibly deregulated sectors, such as the brewing industry, the retail sector, and textiles. Of the 66 publicly traded retailers in the country, only one is private. There are only 40 private firms among the 1,520 Chinese companies listed on domestic and foreign exchanges.
The Parasitic State
To many observers, Beijing’s tight grip on the Chinese economy means only that its reform process is incomplete. As China continues to open itself, they predict, state control will ease and market forces will clear away inefficient industries and clean up state institutions. The strong belief in gradual but inexorable economic liberalization often has a political corollary: that market forces will eventually produce civil liberties and political pluralism.
It’s a comforting thought. Yet these optimistic visions tend to ignore the neo-Leninist regime’s desperate need for unfettered access to economic spoils. Few authoritarian regimes can maintain power through coercion alone. Most mix coercion with patronage to secure support from key constituencies, such as the bureaucracy, the military, and business interests. In other words, an authoritarian regime imperils its capacity for political control if it embraces full economic liberalization. Most authoritarian regimes know that much, and none better than Beijing.
Today, Beijing oversees a vast patronage system that secures the loyalty of supporters and allocates privileges to favored groups. The party appoints 81 percent of the chief executives of state-owned enterprises and 56 percent of all senior corporate executives. The corporate reforms implemented since the late 1990s—designed to turn wholly state-owned firms into shareholding companies—haven’t made a dent in patronage. In large- and medium-sized state enterprises (ostensibly converted into shareholding companies, some of which are even traded on overseas stock markets), the Communist Party secretaries and the chairmen of the board were the same person about half the time. In 70 percent of the 6,275 large- and medium-sized state enterprises classified as “corporatized” as of 2001, the members of the party committee were members of the board of directors. All told, 5.3 million party officials—about 8 percent of its total membership and 16 percent of its urban members—held executive positions in state enterprises in 2003, the last year for which figures were available.
An incestuous relationship between the state and major industries can doom developing countries, and China is more susceptible than most. The combination of authoritarian rule and the state’s economic dominance has bred a virulent form of crony capitalism, as the ruling elites convert their political power into economic wealth and privilege at the expense of equity and efficiency. The state’s economic dominance preserves systemic economic inefficiency as scarce resources are funneled to local elites and bureaucratic constituencies. The World Bank estimates that, between 1991 and 2000, almost a third of investment decisions in China were misguided. The Chinese central bank’s research shows that politically directed lending was responsible for 60 percent of bad bank loans in 2001–02. The problem persists today. Chinese economic planners revealed in early 2006 that 11 major capital-intensive manufacturing industries were overproducing. For example, the country’s steel industry, the world’s largest, has 116 million tons (or about 30 percent) of excess capacity.
State enterprises are also miserably unprofitable. In 2003, a boom year, their median rate of return on assets was a measly 1.5 percent. More than 35 percent of state enterprises lose money and 1 in 6 has more debts than assets. China is the only country in history to have simultaneously achieved record economic growth and a record number of nonperforming bank loans.
Party membership and business acumen do not often go together. Because of the party’s fixation with high growth, government officials are rewarded for delivering, or appearing to deliver, precisely that. This incentive structure fuels a massive misallocation of capital to “image projects” (such as new factories, luxury shopping malls, recreational facilities, and unnecessary infrastructure) that burnish local officials’ records and strengthen their chances of promotion. The results of these mistakes—gleaming office complexes, industrial parks, landscaped highways, and public squares—tend to impress Western visitors, who view them as further proof of China’s economic prowess.
The Chinese economy is not merely inefficient; it has also fallen victim to crony capitalism with Chinese characteristics—the marriage between unchecked power and illicit wealth. And corruption is worst where the hand of the state is strongest. The most corrupt sectors in China, such as power generation, tobacco, banking, financial services, and infrastructure, are all state-controlled monopolies. None of that is unprecedented, of course. Tycoons in Russia, after all, have looted the state’s natural resources. China, at least, boasts genuine private entrepreneurs who have built prosperous companies. But China’s politically connected tycoons have cashed in on China’s real estate boom; nearly half of Forbes’ list of the 100 richest individuals in China in 2004 were real estate developers.
Various indicators, pieced together from official sources, suggest endemic graft within the state. The number of “large-sum cases” (those involving monetary amounts greater than $6,000) nearly doubled between 1992 and 2002, indicating that more wealth is being looted by corrupt officials. The rot appears to be spreading up the ranks, as more and more senior officials have been ensnared. The number of officials at the county level and above prosecuted by the government rose from 1,386 in 1992 to 2,925 in 2002.
An optimist might believe that these figures reveal stronger enforcement rather than metastasizing corruption, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Dishonest officials today face little risk of serious punishment. On average, 140,000 party officials and members were caught in corruption scandals each year in the 1990s, and 5.6 percent of these were criminally prosecuted. In 2004, 170,850 party officials and members were implicated, but only 4,915 (or 2.9 percent) were subject to criminal prosecution. The culture of official impunity is thriving in China.
What’s worse, corruption is now assuming forms normally associated with regime decay. Corruption involving large numbers of officials used to be rare. Now it’s rampant. Regional data suggest that large-scale corruption rings account for 30 to 60 percent of all the cases of graft uncovered by authorities. In some of the worst instances, entire provincial, municipal, and county governments were found to be tainted. In Heilongjiang Province, a corruption scandal involved more than 400 local officials, including the former governor, the former organizational chief of the party’s provincial committee, a vice governor, the chief prosecutor, the president of the provincial high court, and eight of the province’s 13 party bosses. According to official reports, in Shenyang (the capital of Liaoning Province), Fuzhou (the capital of Fujian Province), and more than 30 other counties and prefectures, groups of senior local officials, including party chiefs and mayors, have been on the payroll of organized gangs involved in murder, extortion, gambling, and prostitution.
As ominous as the corruption itself is what these scandals are beginning to reveal about the government’s legitimacy. In their confessions, corrupt officials often blame their misdeeds on a loss of faith in communism. There is anecdotal evidence that senior party officials have taken to consulting fortune-tellers about their political careers. The ruling elite in China, it appears, is drifting and insecure. Fearful about what the future may hold, some officials do not want to wait even a few years to turn their power into wealth. In 2002, almost 20 percent of the officials prosecuted for bribery and nearly 30 percent of those punished for abuse of power were younger than 35. In Henan Province in 2003, 43 percent of local party bosses caught up in corruption were between 40 and 50 years old (as compared with 32 percent older than 50). China has seen its future leaders, and a disproportionate number of them are on the take.
The Two Chinas
With elites cashing in quickly, ordinary Chinese are falling behind. Estimates from various sources, including the World Bank and the Chinese government, suggest that income inequality has increased at least 50 percent since the late 1970s, making China one of the most unequal societies in Asia. A recent study reports that less than 1 percent of Chinese households control more than 60 percent of the country’s wealth (by comparison, 5 percent of the households in the United States own 60 percent of the wealth). Rising inequality, to be sure, is not unusual in countries moving toward a market economy, but China’s neo-Leninist system, warped incentives, and elitist policies have amplified the trend.
A generation ago, the offspring of the ruling elite took up positions in the government or military; today, they go into business. The social ramifications of their self-dealing are particularly evident in real estate, where peasants regularly earn less than 5 percent of the value of their land while developers pocket 60 percent, with the remainder going into local government coffers. Privatization, too, offers insiders a chance to hit it rich by gobbling up state assets on the cheap. A recent study showed that 60 percent of privatized state enterprises were sold to their managers. As a result, 30 percent of all private-firm owners are now party members.
Meanwhile, basic services and good governance for ordinary Chinese are falling further behind. According to the World Bank, China’s governance ranks in the bottom half of all the countries in the world. China underinvests in crucial social services, especially education and public health. Government expenditures on education fell nearly 20 percent as a share of total education spending in the 1990s. In rural areas, home of China’s poorest citizens, 78 percent of the education budget must be raised from peasants through local taxation and fees, while Beijing provides only 1 percent of the funding for rural education.
In public health, the consequences of misspending are even more severe. Government money, which accounted for 36 percent of all health expenditures in the 1980s, plunged to less than 15 percent by 2000. China has hospitals and equipment, and its per capita spending is higher than comparable developing countries. But these resources are among the most unequally distributed in the world. The World Health Organization rated the fairness of the Chinese healthcare system below all countries except Brazil and Burma. According to China’s own Ministry of Health, two thirds of the population lacks any type of health insurance, and about half of the sick do not seek professional medical treatment at all.
Democracy Delayed
Rapid economic growth has not yet produced China’s much-anticipated political pluralism. Perhaps, some observers speculate, China is still too poor to afford democracy. But with a per capita income of nearly $1,500 ($4,500 if you consider people’s purchasing power), China is richer than many poor democracies. It’s not poverty that is holding up democracy; it’s a neo-Leninist state and the crony capitalism it fosters.
In part, democracy itself has been a victim of the country’s economic expansion. However flawed and mismanaged, the country’s rapid growth has bolstered Beijing’s legitimacy and reduced pressure on its ruling elites to liberalize. Democratic transitions in developing countries are often triggered by economic crises blamed on the incompetence and mismanagement of the ancien régime. China hasn’t experienced that crisis yet. Meanwhile, the riches available to the ruling class tend to drown any movement for democratic reform from within the elite. Political power has become more valuable because it can be converted into wealth and privilege unimaginable in the past. At the moment, China’s economic growth is having a perverse effect on democratization: It makes the ruling elite even more reluctant to part with power.
Lavish government spending on law and order helps to ensure that power-sharing won’t be necessary in the near future. Since the Tiananmen Square tragedy, the party has invested billions in beefing up the paramilitary police force (the People’s Armed Police) that has been deployed in suppressing internal unrest. To counter the threat posed by the information revolution, and especially the Internet, the Chinese government has blended technological savvy with regulatory might. The Chinese “Internet police,” officially known as the Ministry of Public Security’s Internet and Security Supervision Bureau, is reportedly more than 30,000 strong. Its Beijing branch proudly claimed that, in 2002, it participated in a multi-agency exercise to see whether the government could rid the Internet of “harmful content” within 48 hours of the onset of an emergency. (During the exercise, all “harmful content” was removed in 19 hours.) The party’s refined strategy of “selective repression” targets only those who openly challenge its authority while leaving the general public alone. China is one of the few authoritarian states where homosexuality and cross-dressing are permitted, but political dissent is not. Domestic opposition groups and individuals who might challenge the party’s authority are left isolated and powerless.
The emerging social elite, by contrast, is co-opted and coddled. The party showers the urban intelligentsia, professionals, and private entrepreneurs with economic perks, professional honors, and political access. For example, nationwide, 145,000 designated experts, or about 8 percent of senior professionals, received “special government stipends” (monthly salary supplements) in 2004; tens of thousands of former college professors have been recruited into the party and promoted to senior government positions. At least for now, the party’s charm campaign is working: The social groups that are normally the forces of democratization have been politically neutralized.
China’s neo-Leninist regime has formidable resources—but much more serious defects. State-directed investment, made to secure the political loyalty of key constituencies and advance personal careers, will prevent China from realizing its economic potential. The corruption of the state will likely deepen. The deterioration of the public health infrastructure and education systems will generate social tensions and mass alienation, thus eroding the party’s base of support and increasing its vulnerability to the economic or political shocks that will inevitably come.
China has already paid a heavy price for the flaws of its political system and the corruption it has spawned. Its new leaders, though aware of the depth of the decay, are taking only modest steps to correct it. For the moment, China’s strong economic fundamentals and the boundless energy of its people have concealed and offset its poor governance, but they will carry China only so far. Someday soon, we will know whether such a flawed system can pass a stress test: a severe economic shock, political upheaval, a public health crisis, or an ecological catastrophe. China may be rising, but no one really knows whether it can fly.
Minxin Pei is senior associate and director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
quinta-feira, março 02, 2006
49) Os custos diferenciados dos universitários...
Do jornal O Globo, de 27 e fevereiro de 2006
Aluno da Unifesp custa ao governo R$ 92 mil ao ano
Na Universidade Federal do Amapá, gasto cai para R$ 2.400
Demétrio Weber escreve de Brasília para “O Globo”:
Com desempenhos diferentes nas avaliações do Ministério da Educação (MEC), as universidades federais também convivem com distorções na distribuição dos recursos.
Enquanto um estudante da Universidade Federal de SP (Unifesp) custa ao governo R$ 92 mil por ano, na Universidade Federal do Amapá (AP) esse gasto cai para R$ 2.400.
Ou seja, as despesas com um estudante da Unifesp poderiam financiar 38 alunos da Federal do Amapá, segundo cruzamento feito pelo GLOBO com base em dados da Consultoria de Orçamento da Câmara e do Censo da Educação Superior 2004.
Mas a distância entre as duas instituições vai muito além do custo. Especializada na área de saúde, a mais cara do ensino superior, a Unifesp tem mais estudantes de mestrado e doutorado do que de graduação, enquanto a Federal do Amapá nunca formou sequer um doutor.
O cruzamento revela, entretanto, outras distorções: a Universidade Federal da Paraíba, por exemplo, aparece com o sétimo mais alto custo/aluno entre as 45 universidades analisadas.
Em 2005, a instituição gastou R$ 400 milhões e atendeu 16,7 mil estudantes. Com R$ 3 milhões a menos em seu orçamento, a Universidade Federal de Pernambuco matriculou 23 mil alunos.
Diferenças de gestão e herdadas
Em outro levantamento feito pelo GLOBO para verificar a qualidade das instituições, levando em conta os melhores resultados obtidos no Provão e no Exame Nacional de Desempenho dos Estudantes (Enade), a Federal da Paraíba ficou em 33 lugar, bem atrás da federal de Pernambuco, que ocupou a 14 posição.
O secretário de Educação Superior do MEC, Nelson Maculan, diz que as disparidades são resultado tanto de distorções históricas quanto da capacidade de gestão dos reitores.
“Há diferenças herdadas e diferenças de gestão”, diz Maculan, que já foi reitor da UFRJ.
Mais direto, o diretor de Políticas Educacionais da União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE), Márcio Cabral, afirma: “Há universidades mais bem administradas que outras”.
Hospitais pesam muito nas contas
Maculan entende que as distorções podem estar relacionadas também à folha de pagamento dos professores.
Ele diz que as despesas com aposentados e pensionistas não deveriam ser contabilizada nesse tipo de comparação, pois as folhas de pessoal foram inchadas no passado:
“A Universidade Federal da Paraíba teve um reitor muito ativo na época em que não havia concurso e conseguiu levar muita gente para lá. Ele era politicamente forte na época da ditadura”, diz Maculan.
O presidente da Associação Nacional de Dirigentes das Instituições Federais de Ensino Superior (Andifes), Oswaldo Baptista Duarte Filho, diz que os gastos de pessoal consomem a maior parte do orçamento das federais.
Segundo ele, que é reitor da Universidade Federal de São Carlos (SP), as distorções orçamentárias existem e tanto a entidade quanto o MEC já discutem formas de resolver o problema.
“Em tese, o dimensionamento de pessoal varia muito. Agora vamos começar a corrigir distorções históricas do quantitativo de pessoal”, diz o presidente da Andifes.
O presidente da Capes, Jorge Guimarães, ressalva que qualquer comparação de custo entre as federais precisa levar em conta os hospitais universitários.
Ele pondera também que é preciso dar pesos diferenciados para alunos de pós-graduação, o que ajudaria a explicar o custo mais elevado dos alunos da Unifesp.
“O custeio dos hospitais deveria ser feito pelo Ministério da Saúde, pois o atendimento é muito maior do que o necessário para ensinar os estudantes. É para o público mesmo”, diz Jorge Guimarães.
Segundo a Secretaria de Educação Superior, 31 instituições mantêm 45 hospitais. Só a UFRJ tem oito hospitais ou unidades de saúde.
Dona do maior orçamento entre as federais — R$ 1 bilhão — e do segundo mais alto custo por aluno (R$ 31 mil por ano), a UFRJ tem 4.432 funcionários trabalhando exclusivamente nas unidades de saúde.
O levantamento de “O Globo” compara os gastos de 2005 — orçamento liquidado — com o número de estudantes de graduação e pós-graduação matriculados em 2004, ano mais recente com informações disponíveis no MEC.
Sete universidades funcionam com custo/aluno inferior a R$ 10 mil por ano. Ao todo, 27 instituições consomem menos de R$ 20 mil por aluno/ano.
Maior instituição federal de ensino superior do país, a UFRJ tem mais estudantes e professores do que as demais 45 universidades geridas pelo MEC.
Quando se divide o número de alunos pelo de professores, porém, a UFRJ apresenta 10,5 estudantes por docente, proporção menor do que a de 30 outras instituições federais e abaixo até da taxa observada pelo MEC na criação de novas Universidades.
A relação aluno/professor expõe disparidades que vão além dos critérios técnicos e indica que milhares de vagas poderiam ser abertas se o problema fosse corrigido.
Número de professor por aluno varia
“O Globo” cruzou dados do Censo da Educação Superior 2004 e do relatório da Capes que mostram que a Unifesp tem a mais baixa taxa aluno/professor das federais: 5,4.
Já a taxa da Universidade Federal do Amapá é sete vezes maior: 41,5, a mais alta entre as federais. O cálculo considera os estudantes de graduação, mestrado e doutorado.
A Unifesp, focada na área médica, tem mais cursos e alunos de pós do que de graduação, o que explica a diferença na relação aluno/professor, segundo o secretário de Educação Superior do MEC, Nelson Maculan.
O cruzamento revela ainda distorção entre duas universidades da Região Norte: a Federal de Rondônia tem a segunda maior taxa de alunos por professor (39,2), enquanto a de Roraima tem a segunda menor: 7,1.
Alertado por “O Globo”, Maculan disse achar esquisita a diferença e lembrou que a contratação de pessoal nas federais esteve sujeita a interferências políticas no passado, quando não havia a obrigatoriedade de concurso para todos os cargos de professor.
Ele admitiu que há distorções, e que o MEC trabalha para corrigi-las.
O presidente da Associação Nacional de Dirigentes das Instituições Federais de Ensino Superior (Andifes), Oswaldo Baptista Duarte Filho, também estranhou a diferença nas federais de Roraima e Rondônia.
Segundo ele, a entidade de reitores considera adequadas as taxas de seis estudantes por professor em cursos de medicina, dez por docente nas engenharias, e 12 ou mais na área de humanas.
A presidente do Sindicato Nacional de Docentes das Instituições de Ensino Superior (Andes-Sindicato), Marina Barbosa, critica o fato de que cerca de oito mil dos 54 mil cargos de professor nas federais sejam preenchidos com substitutos, que trabalham no máximo por dois anos.
E diz que foi criado um grupo de trabalho para estudar a proporção de estudantes por professor.
Sem considerar o número de cursos e suas respectivas áreas do conhecimento, o cruzamento feito por “O Globo” revela que cerca de 217 mil vagas poderiam ser criadas, se as 38 universidades federais com taxas abaixo do recomendado pelo MEC adotassem o padrão mínimo de 16 estudantes por professor.
Isso é quase o dobro das 125 mil vagas que o ministério pretende criar em quatro anos com a expansão universitária.
Pelo mesmo critério, outras 18 mil vagas deixariam de existir nas universidades que têm taxas acima do proposto pelo MEC. O saldo, nesse caso, seria de 199 mil novas vagas.
(O Globo, 27/2)
Aluno da Unifesp custa ao governo R$ 92 mil ao ano
Na Universidade Federal do Amapá, gasto cai para R$ 2.400
Demétrio Weber escreve de Brasília para “O Globo”:
Com desempenhos diferentes nas avaliações do Ministério da Educação (MEC), as universidades federais também convivem com distorções na distribuição dos recursos.
Enquanto um estudante da Universidade Federal de SP (Unifesp) custa ao governo R$ 92 mil por ano, na Universidade Federal do Amapá (AP) esse gasto cai para R$ 2.400.
Ou seja, as despesas com um estudante da Unifesp poderiam financiar 38 alunos da Federal do Amapá, segundo cruzamento feito pelo GLOBO com base em dados da Consultoria de Orçamento da Câmara e do Censo da Educação Superior 2004.
Mas a distância entre as duas instituições vai muito além do custo. Especializada na área de saúde, a mais cara do ensino superior, a Unifesp tem mais estudantes de mestrado e doutorado do que de graduação, enquanto a Federal do Amapá nunca formou sequer um doutor.
O cruzamento revela, entretanto, outras distorções: a Universidade Federal da Paraíba, por exemplo, aparece com o sétimo mais alto custo/aluno entre as 45 universidades analisadas.
Em 2005, a instituição gastou R$ 400 milhões e atendeu 16,7 mil estudantes. Com R$ 3 milhões a menos em seu orçamento, a Universidade Federal de Pernambuco matriculou 23 mil alunos.
Diferenças de gestão e herdadas
Em outro levantamento feito pelo GLOBO para verificar a qualidade das instituições, levando em conta os melhores resultados obtidos no Provão e no Exame Nacional de Desempenho dos Estudantes (Enade), a Federal da Paraíba ficou em 33 lugar, bem atrás da federal de Pernambuco, que ocupou a 14 posição.
O secretário de Educação Superior do MEC, Nelson Maculan, diz que as disparidades são resultado tanto de distorções históricas quanto da capacidade de gestão dos reitores.
“Há diferenças herdadas e diferenças de gestão”, diz Maculan, que já foi reitor da UFRJ.
Mais direto, o diretor de Políticas Educacionais da União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE), Márcio Cabral, afirma: “Há universidades mais bem administradas que outras”.
Hospitais pesam muito nas contas
Maculan entende que as distorções podem estar relacionadas também à folha de pagamento dos professores.
Ele diz que as despesas com aposentados e pensionistas não deveriam ser contabilizada nesse tipo de comparação, pois as folhas de pessoal foram inchadas no passado:
“A Universidade Federal da Paraíba teve um reitor muito ativo na época em que não havia concurso e conseguiu levar muita gente para lá. Ele era politicamente forte na época da ditadura”, diz Maculan.
O presidente da Associação Nacional de Dirigentes das Instituições Federais de Ensino Superior (Andifes), Oswaldo Baptista Duarte Filho, diz que os gastos de pessoal consomem a maior parte do orçamento das federais.
Segundo ele, que é reitor da Universidade Federal de São Carlos (SP), as distorções orçamentárias existem e tanto a entidade quanto o MEC já discutem formas de resolver o problema.
“Em tese, o dimensionamento de pessoal varia muito. Agora vamos começar a corrigir distorções históricas do quantitativo de pessoal”, diz o presidente da Andifes.
O presidente da Capes, Jorge Guimarães, ressalva que qualquer comparação de custo entre as federais precisa levar em conta os hospitais universitários.
Ele pondera também que é preciso dar pesos diferenciados para alunos de pós-graduação, o que ajudaria a explicar o custo mais elevado dos alunos da Unifesp.
“O custeio dos hospitais deveria ser feito pelo Ministério da Saúde, pois o atendimento é muito maior do que o necessário para ensinar os estudantes. É para o público mesmo”, diz Jorge Guimarães.
Segundo a Secretaria de Educação Superior, 31 instituições mantêm 45 hospitais. Só a UFRJ tem oito hospitais ou unidades de saúde.
Dona do maior orçamento entre as federais — R$ 1 bilhão — e do segundo mais alto custo por aluno (R$ 31 mil por ano), a UFRJ tem 4.432 funcionários trabalhando exclusivamente nas unidades de saúde.
O levantamento de “O Globo” compara os gastos de 2005 — orçamento liquidado — com o número de estudantes de graduação e pós-graduação matriculados em 2004, ano mais recente com informações disponíveis no MEC.
Sete universidades funcionam com custo/aluno inferior a R$ 10 mil por ano. Ao todo, 27 instituições consomem menos de R$ 20 mil por aluno/ano.
Maior instituição federal de ensino superior do país, a UFRJ tem mais estudantes e professores do que as demais 45 universidades geridas pelo MEC.
Quando se divide o número de alunos pelo de professores, porém, a UFRJ apresenta 10,5 estudantes por docente, proporção menor do que a de 30 outras instituições federais e abaixo até da taxa observada pelo MEC na criação de novas Universidades.
A relação aluno/professor expõe disparidades que vão além dos critérios técnicos e indica que milhares de vagas poderiam ser abertas se o problema fosse corrigido.
Número de professor por aluno varia
“O Globo” cruzou dados do Censo da Educação Superior 2004 e do relatório da Capes que mostram que a Unifesp tem a mais baixa taxa aluno/professor das federais: 5,4.
Já a taxa da Universidade Federal do Amapá é sete vezes maior: 41,5, a mais alta entre as federais. O cálculo considera os estudantes de graduação, mestrado e doutorado.
A Unifesp, focada na área médica, tem mais cursos e alunos de pós do que de graduação, o que explica a diferença na relação aluno/professor, segundo o secretário de Educação Superior do MEC, Nelson Maculan.
O cruzamento revela ainda distorção entre duas universidades da Região Norte: a Federal de Rondônia tem a segunda maior taxa de alunos por professor (39,2), enquanto a de Roraima tem a segunda menor: 7,1.
Alertado por “O Globo”, Maculan disse achar esquisita a diferença e lembrou que a contratação de pessoal nas federais esteve sujeita a interferências políticas no passado, quando não havia a obrigatoriedade de concurso para todos os cargos de professor.
Ele admitiu que há distorções, e que o MEC trabalha para corrigi-las.
O presidente da Associação Nacional de Dirigentes das Instituições Federais de Ensino Superior (Andifes), Oswaldo Baptista Duarte Filho, também estranhou a diferença nas federais de Roraima e Rondônia.
Segundo ele, a entidade de reitores considera adequadas as taxas de seis estudantes por professor em cursos de medicina, dez por docente nas engenharias, e 12 ou mais na área de humanas.
A presidente do Sindicato Nacional de Docentes das Instituições de Ensino Superior (Andes-Sindicato), Marina Barbosa, critica o fato de que cerca de oito mil dos 54 mil cargos de professor nas federais sejam preenchidos com substitutos, que trabalham no máximo por dois anos.
E diz que foi criado um grupo de trabalho para estudar a proporção de estudantes por professor.
Sem considerar o número de cursos e suas respectivas áreas do conhecimento, o cruzamento feito por “O Globo” revela que cerca de 217 mil vagas poderiam ser criadas, se as 38 universidades federais com taxas abaixo do recomendado pelo MEC adotassem o padrão mínimo de 16 estudantes por professor.
Isso é quase o dobro das 125 mil vagas que o ministério pretende criar em quatro anos com a expansão universitária.
Pelo mesmo critério, outras 18 mil vagas deixariam de existir nas universidades que têm taxas acima do proposto pelo MEC. O saldo, nesse caso, seria de 199 mil novas vagas.
(O Globo, 27/2)
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