Vaga de agitação no planeta Terra

From Baghdad to Kyiv to Haiti, people everywhere are rising up. The U.S. is a big part of the problem, por Will Bunch (The Philadelphia Inquirer):

Heard about Baghdad? Heard about Haiti? Heard about Kyiv, Ukraine?

It’s life during a wartime, of sorts, against the 21st century rot of corrupt governance, inequality and injustice, and in accelerating fashion over the course of 2019 it’s been spreading across every time zone and every major continent, from the now-bloodied streets of Iraq to the faded capitals of South America to the vast central squares of Eastern Europe. (...)

The autumn of 2019 is fast becoming the most revolutionary season on Planet Earth since 1989 (with 2011 in the argument) when the Berlin Wall fell and it took a dictator’s tanks to subdue protesters at Tiananmen Square. This time, the fires burn differently from place to place, but the sparks are pretty much the same everywhere.

Vaga de agitação na América Latina

Why political turmoil is erupting across Latin America, por Mary Beth Sheridan (Washington Post):

In Peru, the president dissolved Congress.

In Honduras, the president is battling U.S. allegations he received bribes from drug lords.

In Haiti, demonstrations threaten to topple the government. And in Ecuador, protests grew so chaotic that the administration high-tailed it out of the capital city.

Não sei se alguma vez tinha visto chamar "América Latina" ao Haiti, mas faz sentido (ainda mais porque acho que o termo "América Latina" até foi promovido pelos franceses por altura da intervenção no México, para dar a entender que haveria algo em comum entre a França e o México, logo as colónias e ex-colónias francesas serão definitivamente "latinas" - embora duvido que alguém chame "América Latina" ao Quebec).

Ainda a "classe operária"

A respeito disto, ocorre-me que mesmo alguns exemplos ficcionais de "classe operária" conservadora já estão na transição entre "classe operária" e outra coisa qualquer - o mais célebre de todos, o Archie Bunker de "Uma Família às Direitas" durante a maior parte da série era encarregado na fábrica onde trabalhava e nas horas vagas conduzia um taxi (não é muito claro o regime laboral em que ele conduzia o táxi, que creio era de um amigo - , mas suspeito que fosse algo do tipo "ficas com o que fizeres [ou uma fração]"), ou seja, alguém que já estaria na transição entre proletariado e a pequena-burguesa (assalariado mas com funções de chefia, e com um segundo trabalho quase por conta própria)*.

Já a Roseanne Conner de "Roseanne" (em que aí foi mais a atriz que fez ela uma viragem da esquerda radical para a direita; confesso que não sei se isso se refletia na série em si - de que só vi a primeira época, e já há quase 30 anos - mas pelo menos refletia-se na imagem pública da série) era uma proletária típica, mas o marido era um micro-empresário.

* É verdade que por este critério arrisco-me a excluir da "classe operária" toda a gente que faça biscates ao fim de semana, ou mesmo que vá à pesca

A "classe operária branca" é na verdade muita "pequena-burguesia branca"

Pelo menos nos EUA, mas suspeito que não só: We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is, por Thomas B. Edsall (New York Times):

This movement of white voters has been evolving over the past 60 years. A paper published earlier this month, “Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era,” provides fresh insight into that transformation. (...)

Perhaps most significant, [the authors] Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.

Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party. (...)

Kitschelt and Rehm write:

Individuals in the low-education/high-income group tend to endorse authoritarian noneconomic policies and tend to oppose progressive economic policies. Small business owners and shopkeepers — particularly in construction, crafts, retail, and personal services — as well as some of their salaried associates populate this group.

In an email, Kitschelt elaborated:

Unlike much of the current debate, the ‘white working class’ — concentrated in the low-education/low-income sector of the white population — is not the category that has most ardently realigned toward Republicans. It’s higher income/low education whites

Um dos problemas dos tais estudos eleitorais e sondagens que frequentemente dizem que a "classe operária" (ou "working class", o que não é necessariamente a mesma coisa) está-se a voltar para a direita e extrema-direita é que frequentemente usam as habilitações académicas como proxy para a classe social; mas ao chamarmos "classe operária" a toda a gente sem frequência universitária, estamos a incluir não apenas a "classe operária" tradicional (conceito já de si muito ambíguo [pdf]) mas também muita gente que desde o século XX (ou mesmo até antes) tem sido quase sempre um bastião da direita - agricultores, pequenos comerciantes e empresários, taxistas, gerentes de lojas, vendedores à comissão, etc. (em Portugal, essas classes têm sido a coluna vertebral do PSD); é verdade que a outra maneira de definir "classe operária" (pelo rendimento) tem o problema oposto - apanha muitos professores, assistentes sociais, quadros intermédios, etc. em principio de carreira, e que por isso têm rendimentos baixos (já agora, será essa a coluna vertebral do BE?). Ainda por cima, ambas as variáveis têm um problema muito similar - acabam frequentemente por ser proxys, não para a classe social, mas para a idade: definindo "classe operária" como "pessoas sem formação universitária", acabamos por incluir muita gente simplesmente por ser relativamente idosa (e provavelmente fazendo a "classe operária" parecer mais de direita do que efetivamente é); e definindo "classe operária" como "pessoas que ganham menos que Z", acabamos por incluir muita gente simplesmente por ser relativamente jovem (e provavelmente fazendo a "classe operária" parecer mais de esquerda do que efetivamente é).

Ainda sobre isto (mas escrito há 7 anos), The white working class, por John Quiggin, no Crooked Timber:  

US political discussion uses two very different (though correlated) concepts of “working class”. The first is the more or less standard one – people who depend on wage labor (normally in manual or low-status service occupations) for their income. The second, specific to the US, and standard in most political polling, is “people without a 4-year college degree”, a class which includes such horny-handed sons and daughters of toil as Bill Gates and Paris Hilton. More prosaically, it includes lots of small business owners, and (since college graduation rates were rising until relative recently), over-represents the old.

E (também de há 7 anos - basicamente estes artigos foram escritos aquando da campanha pela reeleição de Obama, em 2012), The Working White Working Class Really Is Leaving the Democrats, de Jonathan Haidt, que usa a definição "classe operária = pessoa com menos que 4 anos de formação universitária" (e que tem a vantagem, para quem se queira entreter com esta polémica, de referir montes de artigos sobre o tema, de um lado e do outro - incluindo, aliás, um artigo de Thomas Edsall, o autor do artigo que inspira este post, com, pelos vistos, uma posição oposta à que tem agora..).

Cessar-fogo em Rojava? Ou simplesmente "luz verde" à Turquia?

Pence And Pompeo ‘Ceasefire’ Benefits Turks, Syria, And Russia, Screws Kurds, por Doug Mataconis (Outside the Beltway):

After meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for four hours in Ankara, Vice-President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo announced a ceasefire in the ongoing Turkish offensive in northern Syria that, if successful, will give the Turks essentially everything they want while completing what many have called the betrayal of the Syrian Kurds (...)

It’s worth noting that the Turks are most emphatically not calling this a ceasefire (...)

Whether you call this agreement a “cease=fire” or not is immaterial, what matters are the details, and those details leave much to be desired. Essentially what is happening here is that the Turkish military will halt its current advance for five days. During that five day period, at least two things must happen.

First, the American forces that remain in northern Syria will withdraw completely from the region. This is something that President Trump had already agreed to, of course, but the rapid advance of the Turkish forces, combined with the speed with which Syrian forces have rushed in to fill the vacuum pursuant to their new agreement with the Kurds, have placed Americans in the middle of a potential clash between the Turks and the Syrians. This agreement gives the Americans time to complete their withdrawal. Oh, and one more thing, the agreement requires us to lift the very minimal sanctions that we imposed against Turkey in the wake of the invasion.

The second thing that must happen over the next five days is the complete withdrawal of Kurdish forces from the so-called “safe zone” declared by the Turks as part of their invasion. Exactly where the Kurds are supposed to go is unclear, but possibilities include the idea that they may withdraw into Iraqi territory where the Kurds have a nearly de facto autonomous region. Whatever the case, it means that the Syrian Kurds will be forced to give up th gains they have made over the past nearly ten years of civil war, and will get nothing in return for it except for the privilege of not getting killed by Turkish forces.

Como já escrevi noutro sítio,não se interprete este post como estar a defender que os EUA devessem intervir ao lado dos curdos contra  a Turquia.

O acordo do Brexit

Pelo que tenho lido, é a "rendição":

Diga-se que estou convencido que este acordo vai ser chumbado no parlamento e que o mais provável ainda é mesmo um hard brexit sem acordo nenhum.

A democracia boliviana a enfraquecer?

How Evo Morales running again — and again — undermines Bolivia’s democracy, por  Ben Raderstorf e Michael J. Camilleri (Washington Post):

Unlike with Morales’s counterparts in Latin America’s three consolidated dictatorships — Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua — his past elections have been democratic and his governance style autocratic but not authoritarian. Members of Bolivia’s long-suppressed indigenous majority felt vindicated by the election of an Aymara president, and many analysts now see Morales’s 13 years in office as successful on economic merits, with consistent growth (real GDP per capita has almost doubled) alongside fairly ambitious socialist redistributive efforts. (...)

[I]t is difficult to predict how this election will go. For Bolivians, the stakes go far beyond control of the presidency. Morales has shown a growing willingness to use state institutions and resources to secure his hold in power. If he is reelected, he will govern from a position of political and economic weakness, a reality he has yet to confront. A government that is politically vulnerable today might be unelectable by 2024. Morales, who will turn 60 later this month, might have burnished his reputation by quitting while he was ahead. Instead, it is difficult to see him walking away. Having eliminated the formal constraint of term limits, he might find that extending his rule under less accommodating conditions requires a more decisive break with democratic checks and balances. If so, Bolivia risks following the paths of Venezuela and Nicaragua, where authoritarian consolidation became the only alternative to surrendering power.

Novo acordo do Brexit

Brexit: European Commission recommends the European Council (Article 50) to endorse the agreement reached on the revised Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland and revised Political Declaration

A morte dos académicos favorece o progresso intelectual?

Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? (NBER)

In Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? (NBER Working Paper No.21788), Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin explore the famous quip by physicist Max Planck. They show that the premature deaths of elite scientists affect the dynamics of scientific discovery. Following such deaths, scientists who were not collaborators with the deceased stars become more visible, and they advance novel ideas through increased publications within the field of the deceased star. These "emerging stars" are often scientists who were not previously active within that field. The results suggest that outsiders to a specific scientific field are reluctant to challenge a research star who is viewed as a leader within that field.

Finalmente Brexit?

The latest Brexit plan may stand a chance but unanswered questions remain, por David Henig:

If you’re confused by the latest Brexit plan, which seems to involve Northern Ireland being simultaneously both in and out of both the EU and UK customs zones, then fear not, you are far from alone. For in obscure corners of social media and face-to-face at various trade events in the last few days, specialists have been asking various questions, trying to understand what it is the UK government seems to be proposing.

The outline plan was enough to persuade the EU to enter serious talks, unlike the previous ideas of alternative border arrangements based around technology. It was enough for Leo Varadkar to join Boris Johnson in seeing a pathway to a Brexit summit. There’s obviously something to it, so let’s examine what that could be.

Joseph Schumpeter e o corporativismo

Beyond the Business Cycle and Socialism: The Late Schumpeter's Corporatist View, por Sergio Noto (SSRN):

The paper discusses the late endorsement by J. Schumpeter of the corporatist theory. The corporatist view was definitely enunciated by him during a well known conference held in Montreal on November 19th 1945, but this was probably the end of more antique process, the consequence of a cultural network, to which Schumpeter attended since the beginning of his American experience.

Uma coisa que me ocorre é se Schumpeter não terá sido uma espécie de Pedro Arroja do século passado (um economista liberal que chegou à conclusão que o liberalismo não tinha grande futuro - por motivos mais culturais do que económicos - e voltou-se para outros lados*).

* diga-se que dando agora uma olhada pelo blogue do Pedro Arroja, não sei se ele não terá entretanto regressado ao liberalismo.

O Vento Sueste no Facebook

O blogue agora tem uma página no Facebook, que em princípio só servirá para linkar para os posts (como já ninguém usa o RSS, é um substituto).

A valorização das empresas em bolsa é sobretudo resultado da exploração dos trabalhadores

Too Many Companies Drain Value From the Economy, por Noah Smith (Bloomberg):

This is an important and timely debate, since during the past 15 years, corporate profits have taken in a historically large share of the value produced by the U.S. economy (...).

And in recent years, stock valuations have increased faster than either profits or the economy itself (...).

How much of this increase in market value was due to rent extraction, or to the expectation of future rent extraction? Economists Daniel Greenwald, Martin Lettau and Sydney Ludvigson believe they have an answer: Most of it. In a recent paper, they built a model of the economy in which the value created by businesses could be arbitrarily reallocated between shareholders and workers. They found that redistribution from workers to shareholders accounted for 54% of increased stock wealth. Falling interest rates, rising investor appetites for risk and economic growth comprised the remaining 46%.

O tal paper - How the Wealth Was Won: Factors Shares as Market Fundamentals, por Daniel L. Greenwald, Martin Lettau e Sydney C. Ludvigson:

We provide novel evidence on the driving forces behind the sharp increase in equity values over the post-war era. From the beginning of 1989 to the end of 2017, 23 trillion dollars of real equity wealth was created by the nonfinancial corporate sector. We estimate that 54% of this increase was attributable to a reallocation of rents to shareholders in a decelerating economy. Economic growth accounts for just 24%, followed by lower interest rates (11%) and a lower risk premium (11%). From 1952 to 1988 less than half as much wealth was created, but economic growth accounted for 92% of it.

Condenado à morte por aprovar livros

‘There’s no hope for the rest of us.’ Uyghur scientists swept up in China’s massive detentions (Science):

No one outside the Chinese government knows where Tashpolat Tiyip is. No one knows exactly what charges have been filed against him. The only thing that anyone really knows is that in April 2017, as the geographer and former president of Xinjiang University in Ürümqi prepared to fly from Beijing to Berlin for a scientific conference and the launch of a research center, he disappeared without even a phone call to colleagues or family.

Six months later, a Chinese propaganda video emerged saying Tiyip was one of 88 scholars who had “deeply poisoned the minds” of students by approving textbooks with too much content from Uyghur sources—the ethnic group that makes up about half of Xinjiang province’s 24 million people. The video calls Tiyip and three other Uyghurs “two-faced” separatists before announcing their sentence: death, with a 2-year reprieve.

Dos IWW às lutas na Google e na Uber

The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers (New York Times):

Just before 20,000 Google employees left their desks last fall to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment, a debate broke out among the hundreds of workers involved in formulating a list of demands. (...)

But the argument that gained the upper hand, especially as the debate escalated in the weeks after the walkout, held that those approaches would be futile, according to two people involved. Those who felt this way contended that only a less formal, worker-led organization could succeed, by waging mass resistance or implicitly threatening to do so.

This view, based on century-old ideas, did not emerge in a vacuum. It can be traced in part to a book called “Labor Law for the Rank and Filer,” which many Googlers had read and discussed.

Its authors are a longtime labor historian, Staughton Lynd, and an organizer, Daniel Gross. They identify with a strain of unionism popularized in the early 1900s by the Industrial Workers of the World (...)

And Googlers aren’t the only ones who have drawn inspiration from the book. Workers at the crowdfunding company Kickstarter, the site of a recent union campaign, have studied it. Organizers with one of the largest Uber driver groups say the ideas have influenced them as well.

Ares Geovanos, a longtime volunteer for the Tech Workers Coalition, which seeks to organize workers across the industry, said the book’s key contention — that a dedicated group of employees can accomplish more through actions like strikes than by formal efforts to certify a union — had gained traction partly because it reflects reality: Most tech workers have traditionally been reluctant to organize.

A situação nos EUA é bastante diferente da portuguesa (p.ex., lá os sindicatos são certificados oficialmente, por votação, como representantes legais dos trabalhadores de dada profissão e/ou empresa), mas apesar de tudo essas organizações informais não-certificadas parecem-me ter algum paralelismo com o aparecimento cá de sindicatos não alinhados com as centrais sindicais (como os motoristas de matérias perigosas, os enfermeiros ou o Sindicato de Todos Os Professores), e que nalguns casos (nomeadamente os enfermeiros e o STOP) parecem por vezes funcionar menos como organizações estruturadas e mais como simples siglas para dar cobertura jurídica a greves largamente self-service feitas por trabalhadores quem nem sequer estão neles filiados.

Ver o meu post de maio,Um espectro assombra o mundo, o espectro das greves.

Porque o mapa eleitoral de Portugal parece-se com as fronteiras de 1160.

Thread no twiter, por Alexandre Afonso:

Here's a small thread about why the map of the 2015 legislative elections in Portugal looks remarkably similar to the map of Portugal in 1160 (e também o de Espanha, já agora).

Os problemas de não ter bem uma constituição

BORIS Johnson is planning to tell the Queen she cannot sack him as Prime Minister even if he loses a no confidence vote and MPs choose a caretaker replacement. (The Sun)

Poderão perguntar - acabou de haver eleições em Portugal, um assunto susceptível de montes de análises, e o Miguel continua obcecado com a situação política no Reino Unido? Mas a verdade é que a atual crise institucional britânica (nomedamente como desporto de espetador) é muito mais divertida.

A aliança entre a Amazon e a polícia

Amazon Has Already Roped 200 Police Departments Into Its Ring Doorbell Surveillance/Promotional Scheme, por Tim Cushing (Techdirt): 

If I've learned anything from the past 20 years of J-horror remakes, these documents are the last thing Motherboard's Caroline Haskins will see before she dies.

At least 200 law enforcement agencies around the country have entered into partnerships with Amazon’s home surveillance company Ring, according to an email obtained by Motherboard via public record request.
Ring has never disclosed the exact number of partnerships that it maintains with law enforcement. However, the company has partnered with at least 200 law enforcement agencies, according to notes taken by a police officer during a Ring webinar, which he emailed to himself in April. It’s possible that the number of partnerships has changed since the day the email was sent.

Amazon is slowly but steadily building a surveillance network. It's not just building it for itself. It has Alexa for that. It's building a new one for US law enforcement agencies, free of charge, in exchange for free promotion and future long-term buy-in

Ring's doorbell cameras are a consumer device, but many, many people are getting them for free from local PDs. The incentives work for everyone… except for those concerned about a private company turning people's houses into de facto police cameras.

Como a lei protege o capital

The Code of Capital by Katharina Pistor, por David Murphy (Open Letters Review):

So much discussion around wealth and inequality involves gawking at statistics people don’t understand. Katharina Pistor offers a fascinating argument as to why inequality is increasing, and does so “without having to construct class identities, as Marxists feel compelled to do, or to make heroic assumptions about the rationality of human beings, as rational choice theorists would have it.”  She does not dispute these paradigms (although it isn’t hard to discern where her sympathies lie when you notice her presentation of the concept of capital is informed by people with last names like Polanyi, Harvey, Hobsbawn, Veblen and Stiglitz), rather she argues that “they ignore the central role of law in the making of capital and its protection as private wealth. . . the key to understanding the basis of power and the resulting distribution of wealth lies instead in the process of bestowing legal protection on select assets and to do so as a matter of private, not public, choice.”

Os dois pesos e duas medidas da Organização dos Estados Americanos

Losing Legitimacy? The Organization of American States and its inconsistent defense of democracy, por Adam Ratzlaff (Global Americans):

Luis Almagro, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), has been an outspoken proponent for democracy in Venezuela. Even before Juan Guaidó invoked the country’s Constitution and declared the Venezuelan presidency vacant, under Almagro’s direction the OAS has become a fierce promoter of democracy in the Americas and the defender of free and fair elections. But although Almagro has championed the cause of democracy in Venezuela and Honduras, he has failed to protect democracy in other countries in the region and, in so doing, has threatened the legitimacy of the OAS to respond to democratic crises like the one currently occurring in Venezuela.