Competitiveness

Ontem ao jantar falávamos de competitividade... Aqui ficam os factores essenciais da competitividade segundo a autoridade internacional na matéria, o IMD, que publica anualmente o seu World Competitiveness Yearbook. Para depressão acrescida é só ir ver o ranking dos países...

Competitiveness factors

ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
Domestic Economy
International Trade
International Investment
Employment
Prices

GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY
Public Finance
Fiscal Policy
Institutional Framework
Business Legislation
Societal Framework

BUSINESS EFFICIENCY
Productivity
Labor Market
Finance
Management Practices
Attitudes and Values

INFRASTRUCTURE
Basic Infrastructure
Technological Infrastructure
Scientific Infrastructure
Health and Environment
Education

... enfim.

Execução de Stanley Williams

Caros amigos,

É com grande pesar que vos informo que Stanley Williams foi executado hoje às 8.35 horas da manhã de Portugal continental, meia noite e trinta e cinco na Califórnia, EUA. Agradeço a todos aqueles que enviaram apelos ao Governador Schwarzenegger, pedindo que a sua pena fosse comutada. Schwarzenegger afirmou que manteve a pena por não haver provas da inocência e por Stanley não apresentar remorsos. A morte de Stanley Williams é um exemplo gritante de como a pena de morte nada mais é do que um acto de assassinato estatal. Com a morte de Williams a justiça nada ganhou, e a prevenção da deliquência juvenil sofre um sério revés. Peço a todos os que participaram nesta iniciativa que não desaminem: ainda a 30 de Novembro deste ano conseguimos comutar a pena de outro prisioneiro nos EUA agendado para ser a milésima execução. Quem comutou a pena foi o governador da Virgínia, um dos estados em que se registaram mais execuções desde 1976. A execução de Stanley Williams serviu pelo menos para alertar a opinião pública americana para a crueldade da pena de morte, e para aumentar o número de pessoas que se opõem a ela. Com mais algum trabalho talvez cheguemos ao nosso objectivo: acabar com a pena de morte nos EUA. Para que não hajam mais Stanleys.

Um abraço,

Cláudia Pedra

Directora
Amnistia Internacional - Secção Portuguesa

Nas leituras de Eco: Baudolino é enganado por Zósimo

[...]

- Entre estes monges vinha um tal Zósimo de Calcedónia. Fiquei impressionado com a sua figura magríssima, dois olhos que nem tições rodavam sem parar iluminando uma grande barba negra e uns cabelos compridissímos. Quando falava, mais parecia que dialogava com um crucifixo que lhe sangrava a dois palmos da cara.

-Conheço o tipo, os nossos mosteiros estão cheios deles. Morrem muito jovens,
definhados...

-Ele não. Nunca vi em toda a minha vida tamanho glutão. Uma noite levei-o também a casa de duas cortesãs venezianas, que como talvez saibas são famosíssimas entre as cultoras desta arte tão antiga como o mundo. Às três da manhã eu estava bêbedo e fui-me embora, mas ele ficou, e tempos depois uma das raparigas disse-me que nunca deviam conseguir refrear um satanás daquela espécie.

-Conheço o tipo, os nossos mosteiros estão cheios deles. Morrem muito jovens, definhados...

[...]

Umberto Eco, BAUDOLINO [2000].

The Beauty Myth

BARBIE ARMY by Magreet Bulthuis [2002].
Iris print on summerset paper, 38 x 46 inches, 95 x 115 cm.

[...]

The affluent, educated, liberated woman of the first world, who can enjoy freedoms unavailable to any woman ever before, do not feel as free as they want to. And they can no longer restrict to the subconscious their sense that this lack of freedom has something to do with apparently frivolous issues, things that really should not matter. Many are ashamed to admit such trivial concerns-to do with physical appearance, bodies, faces, hair, and clothes- matter so much. But in spite of shame, guilt, and denial, more and more women are wondering if it isn’t that they are entirely neurotic and alone but rather that something important is indeed at stake that has to do with relationship between female liberation and female beauty.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us. During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest growing medical specialty. During the past five years, consumer spending doubled, pornography became the main media category, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.

It is no accident that so many potentially powerful women feel this way. We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement: the beauty myth. It is the modern version of a social reflex that has been in force since the Industrial revolution. The contemporary backlash is so violent because the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that has the power to control those women whom second-wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable. It has grown stronger to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity no longer can manage. It is seeking right now to undo psychologically and covertly all the good things that feminism did for women materially and overtly.

Reproductive rights gave western women control over our own bodies; the weight of fashion models plummeted to 23% below that of ordinary women, eating disorders rose exponentially, and a mass neurosis was promoted that used food and weight to strip women of that sense of control. Women insisted on politicizing health; new technologies of invasive, potentially deadly “cosmetic” surgeries developed apace to re-exert old forms of medical control of women.

Every generation since about 1830’s has had to fight its version of the beauty myth. “It is very little to me,” says the suffragist Lucy Stone in 1855, “to have the right to vote, to own property, etc. if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right.” Eighty years later, after women had won the vote, and the first wave of the organized women’s movement had subsided, Virginia Wolf wrote that it would still be decades before women could tell the truth about their bodies. In 1962, Betty Friedan quoted a young woman trapped in the Feminine Mystique: “Lately, I look in the mirror, and I am so afraid that I am going to look like my mother.” Eight years after that, heralding the cataclysmic second wave of feminism, Germaine Greer described the “stereotype”. “To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself…. She is a doll… I am sick of the masquerade.”

In spite of the great revolution of the second wave, we are not exempt. The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about institutions and institutional power. The qualities that a given period calls beautiful in women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period considers desirable. The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance. Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that women will be divided from one another. Youth and (until recently) virginity have been “beautiful” in women since they stand for experimental and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is “unbeautiful” since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken. Older women fear young ones, young ones fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female lifespan. Most urgently, women’s identity must be premised upon our “beauty”, so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self esteem exposed to the air. No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it could be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.

The rise of the beauty myth was just one of several emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components of the feminine sphere, the better to enclose those women inside it. Other such fictions arose contemporaneously: a version of childhood that required continual maternal supervision; a concept of female biology that required middle-class women to act out the role of hysterics and hypochondriacs; a conviction that respectable women were sexually anesthetic, and a definition of women’s work that occupied them with repetitive, time-consuming, and painstaking tasks such as needlepoint and lace making. All such Victorian inventions as these served a double function-that is, though they were encouraged as a means to expend female energy and intelligence in harmless ways, women often used them to express genuine creativity and passion. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists, or placards that women will need first, it is a new way to see.

[...]

Naomi Wolf in 'The Beauty Myth' [1991]

No Logo part II

Fences and Windows:

Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate
(Paperback) by
Naomi Klein

A document, in its own right, of a unique time in our history.

Some people have convictions

No Logo lives on beyond the book.

Será que já pensaram em alguma coisa?

Helmut Newton now:
Image for Swarovsky's Calendar [2003].

[...]

e) A promoção, em parceria com outras instituições públicas e privadas, de um “think-tank” sobre “Relações Internacionais”, que possa alimentar intelectualmente a estrutura dirigente do Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros, e que reúna regularmente a massa crítica já hoje existente em Portugal de docentes e investigadores doutorados, sobretudo, nas áreas das relações internacionais, do direito internacional público, do direito comunitário europeu, da economia internacional e europeia, e da história diplomática e das relações internacionais.

[...]

In Discurso de apresentação do capítulo sobre “Política Externa” no debate parlamentar sobre o Programa do XVII Governo Constitucional, proferido pelo Ministro de Estado e dos Negócios Estrangeiros, Freitas do Amaral, na Assembleia da República, em 21 de Março de 2005.

Rulebook of Kyoto Protocol finalized

The United Nations conference on climate change taking place now in Montreal has adopted most of the rulebook for the Kyoto Protocol on Wednesday, which will make the protocol "fully operational."

The 34 signatory countries -- which do not include the United States or Australia -- passed the final regulatory measures by consensus at the Montreal conference. "The Kyoto protocol is now fully operational. This is an historic step," said conference chairman Stephane Dion, Canada's environment minister.

The rules, known as the Marrakesh Accords, specify measures needed to put the protocol into effect, including how greenhouse gas emissions are measured and how targets for emission reduction are set until 2012 and beyond.

The countries attending the conference also produced a mechanism called the "clean development mechanism." Under the mechanism, developed countries can invest in one another, in particular central and east European countries, and thus earn carbon allowances which they can use to meet their emission reduction commitments. In addition, the clean development mechanism also allows industrialized countries to invest in sustainable development projects in developing countries and also earn carbon allowances.

"With these decisions in place, we now have the infrastructure to move ahead with the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol," said Richard Kinley, acting head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat. "It sets a solid basis for future steps to bring emissions down." Kyoto was negotiated in 1997, seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emission by 5 percent until 2012, compared to 1990 levels, and formally entered into force on February 16, 2005. However, it could not come into operation until after the formal adoption of the rulebook, which was drawn up over the past four years.

The signatories also hammered out a mechanism for trading pollution rights. A separate system setting out sanctions for those who breach the protocol should simultaneously be adopted before the 12-day conference ends on December 9.

The European Environment Agency said this week that the 15 "old" member states of the bloc are likely to cut emissions to just 2.5 percent compared to 1990 levels, according to the BBC. With emissions in most member states still on the rise, this figure falls short of the targeted 8 percent cut for the EU under the Kyoto protocol in 2012. In a major policy shift, UK prime minister was set to reveal in a speech last Tuesday that Britain may open new nuclear power plants in a bid to reach emissions targets, as well as to secure the country’s energy provision. The European Climate Change Programme led to the adoption of a range of new policies and measures, among which the EU’s emissions trading scheme, which started its operation on January 2005.

The United States and Australia, which refused to ratify the protocol to the UN framework convention on climate change, attended Wednesday's session as observers. The United States, with five percent of the world's population, emits 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. Harlan Watson, head of the US delegation, said Americans did not want an approach that includes objectives or a timetable to reduce emissions. "The United States is opposed to any such discussions," Watson said. Washington has since 2002 embarked on a voluntary policy to reduce its emissions by 18 percent without harming the US economy, he said.