Mas por outro lado...

As queixas de alguns alegados acionistas da PT (estilo "o Estado que mande no que é dele") também não fazem grande sentido - a golden share já existia quando eles compraram as acções (e o preço a que eles compraram as acções já reflectiu a existência de uma golden share - de certeza que foram mais baratas por isso). No fundo, um acionista ir agora queixar-se da golden share é como eu comprar um apartamento sem direito a garagem e depois reclamar de não poder estacionar o meu carro na garagem do prédio.

Mais - se a UE conseguir impor o fim da golden share, isso quer dizer que os actuais investidores vão receber uma espécie de "maná do céu", já que compraram "gato" (acções numa empresa com uma golden share) a preços de "gato", e de repente iriam ficar com uma "lebre" (acções numa empresa sem golden share).

A "golden share" e o negócio da Vivo (II)

O Daniel Oliveira escreve "A (...) golden share (...) foi usada para impedir que a maior empresa portuguesa perdesse o seu principal activo. Ainda bem."

Mas que mal vinha ao país que a PT perdesse "o seu principal activo"? Afinal, penso que a função de uma "golden share" não é o Governo intervir em defensa do que acha serem os interesses da empresa participada, é intervir em defesa do que acha ser o interesse geral. Como já escrevi alí abaixo, que diferença faz ao português médio quem é o proprietário de uma rede de telemóveis no Brasil?

A "golden share" e o negócio da Vivo

A função de uma "golden share" é poder impedir uma empresa de fazer negócios que possam ser contrários ao "interesse nacional". Agora Pergunto eu - em que medida seria prejudicial ao interesse nacional que a PT vendesse uma participação numa empresa estrangeira? Como é que isso afectaria (para o bem ou para o mal) o povo português?

Para ler

12. “The Third Axiom, or A Logic of Liberty: On the Structure of Ethics and Economics as One Unified Aprioristic Science”

by Peter J. Preusse

11. “Building the Cathedral as Sanctuary: Recognizing Action as the Basis of Property”

by Justin Altman

Um petro-furacão?

The First OilCane? What Happens if a Hurricane Rides over the Oil Spill

The winds of a hurricane are so strong that the normal interface between ocean and atmosphere disappears. The winds begin to generate large waves. Spray is blown off the top of the waves. That spray mixes with the air so that after a short time there is no real boundary between what is ocean and what is the atmosphere. If a large hurricane moves over the spill, this chaotic mixture of water and air will inevitably also contain oil. The oil will become airborne and travel with the hurricane. (...)


Should a major hurricane push the spill towards the gulf coast there will be nothing that can be done to stop it. No amount of planning or engineering will help. No number of visits to the gulf by the president or any other official will stop the inevitable. The storm surge will drive the water and the oil miles inland. Everything in its path will be coated in a greasy bath of crude. Even the wind may have oil in it. In New England, I have seen hurricanes and tropical storms that have blown salt spray many miles inland from the coast. The leaves of the trees eventually turn brown and fall off. In the case of the gulf it will be oil that will spray the trees, buildings and everything else in the way. How far inland this oily mess will blow is anyone’s guess but it will be unprecedented in its economic and environmental damage.

BP queima tartarugas vivas?

Is BP burning sea turtles alive?

VENICE, La. - A boat captain working to rescue sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico says he has seen BP ships burning sea turtles and other wildlife alive.

Captain Mike Ellis said in an interview posted on You Tube that the boats are conducting controlled burns to get rid of the oil.

"They drag a boom between two shrimp boats and whatever gets caught between the two boats, they circle it up and catch it on fire. Once the turtles are in there, they can’t get out," Ellis said.

Ellis said he had to cut short his three-week trip rescuing the turtles because BP quit allowing him access to rescue turtles before the burns.

"They're pretty much keeping us from doing what we need to do out there," Ellis said.

(...)

Ellis said most of the turtles he has seen are Kemps Ridley turtles, a critically endangered species. Harming or killing one would bring stiff civil and criminal penalties and fines of up to $50,000 against BP

Os 10 animais mais inteligentes

The 10 smartest animals (via Marginal Revolution).

Keynes e a social-democracia

Keynes and Social Democracy, por Mark Thoma:

On Keynesian policy and big government, as I've explained many times (e.g.), there is no necessary connection between the size of government and Keynesian stabilization policy. Want the government to grow? Then cure recessions by increasing spending, and pay for it by raising taxes during the good times. After a few business cycles under this policy, government will be larger. This is the strategy that Democrats are accused of playing.


Want the opposite result? No problem, just use tax cuts to stimulate the economy during a recession, then pay for the cuts by reducing government spending during the subsequent boom. A few cycles later, and government is much smaller. This is the Republican starve the beast strategy that they fully admit to playing (I am abstracting, of course, from the political difficulties with either strategy).

Want to keep government the same size? Then simply use the same policy tool on both sides of the business cycle. Increase government spending in a recession, then reverse it in the good times, or, alternatively, cut taxes during the bad times, then raise them when things improve.

Summarizing: Using a different policy tools on each side of as recession changes the size of government, while using the same policy tool does not. But the main point is that, contrary to what you may have been led to believe, there is nothing inherent in Keynesian economics that connects stabilization policy to the size of government.

Realmente, é estranho

A propósito de um protesto de judeus oltra-ortodoxos em Jaffa, um comentador do blogue Secular Right escreve " The demonstrators attacked with bricks and rocks and yet the police didn’t shoot any of the demonstrators? How odd".

"Pontes" e "Tolerâncias de Ponto" (outra vez)

"Pontes" e "Tolerâncias de Ponto" (outra vez), no Vias de Facto.

A "questão belga"

Olá, Valónia! e Olá, Flandres!, por João Tunes

Em «defesa» dos flamengos, por Joana Lopes

Espanha, Irlanda e austeridade

Does Fiscal Austerity Reassure Markets?

Consider, if you will, the comparative cases of Ireland and Spain.

(...)Ireland quickly embraced harsh austerity; Spain has had to be dragged into austerity, and still faces major political unrest.

So, how’s it going? This article is typical of what you read: it describes the Irish as doing what has to be done, while the Spaniards dither. And it has good things to say about how the Irish response is working:

Much bitterness but also stoicism; markets impressed by Irish resolve to bite the austerity bullet.

Well, I guess that’s right — if by “markets impressed” you mean a CDS spread of 226 basis points, compared with 206 points for Spain; not to mention a 10-year bond rate of 5.11 percent, compared with 4.46 percent for Spain.

So, I’m glad to hear that Ireland’s stoic acceptance of austerity is reassuring markets; it must be true, because that’s what everyone says. Because if I didn’t know that, I might look at the data and conclude that markets actually have less confidence in Ireland than they do in Spain, and that austerity in the face of a deeply depressed economy doesn’t actually reassure markets at all.

Somália - tão mau como tudo isso?

Somalia — Is That Really All You Got?, por Kevin Carson, no Center for a Stateless Society:

Rachel Maddow, a popular liberal commentator on MSNBC, recently iterated — for the umpteenth time — the standard (...) talking point of Somalia as a supposedly unanswerable argument against anarchy.

But this is dirty pool for several reasons.  First, no intelligent anarchist argues that the sudden and catastrophic implosion of the state will result in a peaceful, self-regulating society.

We’ve lived through centuries of the process which Pyotr Kropotkin described in “Mutual Aid” and “The State,” by which centralized territorial states suppressed bottom-up, self-organized alternatives, and caused civil society to atrophy. Under such circumstances, when the state suddenly disappears, the result is likely to be a power vacuum with nothing ready to take its place, and the proliferation of all sorts of social pathologies.

(...)

Second, “Somalia” does not equal “Mogadishu.”  Most of the horrific, Mad Max scenes captured in Somalia are in Mogadishu, where the central state was most powerful before the collapse and the institutions of civil society were accordingly most atrophied.  As Roderick Long, director of C4SS’s parent body the Molinari Society, put it, “the farther one gets away from Mogadishu, the more one gets into relatively peaceful areas that have always been anarchic or close to it, barring occasional intrusions from the statebuilders in the city.

(...)

Third, the proper comparison to Somalia is not the United States and similar societies in the West, but to the actual state that existed in Somalia before the collapse of central power. Given that comparison, things in Somalia aren’t that bad at all.  For example:  a study by Benjamin Powell, Ryan Ford and Alex Nowrasteh took “a comparative institutional approach to examine Somalia’s performance relative to other African countries both when Somalia had a government and during its extended period of anarchy.”  And it found that Somalia, when subjected to an honest comparison — “between Somalia when it had a functioning government, and Somalia now” — is less poor, has higher life expectancy, and has experienced a drastic increase in telephone lines.

I’d also add, parenthetically, that while Somalia is often celebrated by anarcho-capitalist types, in reality it hardly fits the anarcho-capitalist stereotype (especially in those areas away from Mogadishu).   For example, there’s widespread communal ownership of land by extended families and clans, with only possessory or usufructory rights by individuals.

A Mente os os Meios de Comunicação

Mind Over Mass Media, no New York Times:

NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.

But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.

Is Applying Libertarian Principles to Israel Anti-Semitic?

Via filipeabrantes

A ler, por "Carol Moore is a 25 year member of the Libertarian Party, a long-time peace activist, and founder of several sites including Secession.Net, WhatWouldGandhiDo.Net, Non-Intervention.Net. She is also webmaster for Libertarians for Peace and Pro-Choice Libertarians. See her other web sites, published and online articles, photographs, etc. atCarolMoore.Net."

Contém uma conhecida citação de Murray N Rothbard:

"In “Pat Buchanan and the Menace of Anti-Anti-Semitism” (1990) Rothbard railed against “the cruel despotism of Organized Anti-Anti-Semitism,” stating: “Wielding the fearsome brand of ‘Anti-Semite’ as a powerful weapon, the professional Anti-Anti-Semite is able, in this day and age, to wound and destroy anyone he disagrees with by implanting this label indelibly in the public mind. How can one argue against this claim, always made with hysteria and insufferable self-righteousness? To reply ‘I am not an anti-Semite’ is as feeble and unconvincing as Richard Nixon's famous declaration that ‘I am not a crook.’"

E começa por citar um grande discurso de George Washington

"Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests." George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address

O Estado é de direito

Excepto quando podem matar, bombardear, destruir, etc. O Estado de Direito é na verdade a organização social que mais produz ausência de direito. Os tribunais e a doutrina é que o dizem.

"An appeals court on Tuesday upheld the dismissal of a $50 million lawsuit against the United States over then-President Bill Clinton's 1998 decision to order a missile attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant.

(...)

The appeals court ruled the case involved a political question covered by a legal doctrine that means the suit cannot be reviewed by the judicial branch." US court dismisses 1998 Sudan missile strike suit

Porque não ter pena da BP? (II)

"City investors said the president was jeopardising the pensions of millions with his "excessive" criticism of the energy company following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Before the accident on April 20, BP was Britain's biggest company, with a stock market value of £122 billion. Since then, £49 billion has been wiped off its value.

On Wednesday, BP's share price fell a further 17.35p to 391.55p – representing a 40 per cent drop on the 655p price of a share two months ago.

Experts have said that the clean-up costs of the oil spill will run to between £10 billion and £20 billion but the biggest cost to the company is from investors dumping stock for fear of BP being further punished by the US Government." www.telegraph.co.uk/

Ameaça de novo golpe nas Honduras?

Honduran president warns of new coup plot (CNN)

More Coup Talk e  Lobo Sosa: I know who wants to throw me out (Honduras Culture and Politics)

Uma sugestão de novas fronteiras para a Europa

Observações:

- Pode haver algumas incorrecções no mapa, mas quem percebe de História (p.ex., o Henrique Burnay) poderá indicá-las para se evitar injustiças no desenho das novas fronteiras

- A "Germânia" e a "Balto-Finlândia" podem ser compostas por vários países (tal como são actualmente, aliás); diga-se que convém, algures na Balto-Finlândia, arranjar espaço para os muitos húngaros que vão ter que abandonar a actual Hungria, de forma a não por em causa o carácter iliriaco/albanês da Grande Albânia

- Não faço a mínima ideia onde se vai arranjar pictos para povoar a Pictia e trácios para povoar a Trácia (parte dos búlgaros terá que ser transferida, ou para a Rússia, ou para algum território balto-finlandês)

E porque não ter pena da BP?

James Cameron on BP

by Lew Rockwell

"Morning Joe has the same content as the rest of the cable MSM: Oil, oil, oil, Helen Thomas, oil, oil, oil. Yesterday James Cameron, movie genius and environmentalist, was on. The last time, he denounced everyone at BP as “stupid.” But this time, he said he had made an investigation, and he thought they were doing “OK.” Indeed, he noted, there was a similar spill off Australia that took four months to cap, and one in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Mexican coast, that took nine months. I thought: nine months, and we’re all still alive, the fish still swim, the sun still shines? You don’t suppose the media are demagoguing the current oil leak, do you? OMG, an oiled bird! (Is that the same fowl we keep seeing?) Forget the wars, the economy, the police state.

Also on, the creepy Sen. Schumer, who called for ending the $75 million liability cap on oil spill damages, and said that if that bankrupted BP, so be it. Companies that cannot pay their obligations must go out of business. Well, yes, though no one sought to ask who put on the cap—the oily Bush I and Congress—and why this laudable principle did not apply to Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citibank, and the rest of Schumer’s beloved bosses, for whom he arranged vast taxpayer bailouts, in effect a cap on their liability, to prevent them from going bankrupt. Note: BP has already paid out almost $1.25 billion." Via LRC