Kadhafi, uma vida preenchida...

Agora que ca era Kadhafi parece estar a chegar ao fim, com o apoio entusiastíco de alguns dos seus ex-amigos, é a altura de relembrar alguns factos.

Segundo li em tempos, Kadhafi era um oficial líbio do exército do então rei Idriss (a Líbia era uma monarquia) e estava a frequentar um curso no Reino Unido juntamente com alguns outros oficiais.

Num intervalo do curso ele e outro oficial (Jaloud, caído em desgraça nos anos noventa do Século passado), foram visitar um casino em Londres, o Victoria Sporting Club.

Numa mesa de jogo estava um indivíduo, de costas para eles a perder dinheiro aos montões, individuo este que a certa altura se voltou para trás e foi reconhecido pelos dois oficiais, era o Ministro das Finanças da Líbia... segundo parece foi nesta altura que os dois oficiais resolveram fazer um golpe de estado...

Bom, eu sempre senti alguma empatia com o Kadhafi pois, mais ou menos na mesma altura, entrei também no Victoria Sporting Club e, à minha frente, na mesa de baccarat , estava um estrangeiro, também a perder dinheiro aos montões. Recordo que segundo as contas que fiz na altura, o tal jogador perdeu, num apíce, dinheiro que dava para comprar mais de uma dúzia de Minis (que era o carro dos meus sonhos...).

Nunca saberei se este estrangeiro era o Ministro das Finanças da Líbia e se, atrás dele, de frente para mim, não estariam Kadhafi e Jaloud. Mas, pouco importa, se ele fosse o Ministro das Finanças do meu país, eu teria feito o mesmo raciocínio do Kadhafi e do Jaloud.

E, agora que está na moda bater no Kadhafi e no luxo das suas casas, talvez fosse bom recordar como era a Líbia antes de Kadhafi, um país miserável, com mais de 80% de analfabetos e compara-la com a Líbia actual.

Vice campeões, lições a tirar

Portugal perdeu na final do campeonato mundial de futebol sub-20. O Brasil ganhou e sagrou-se campeão.

Mas a equipa portuguesa, sem estrelas e de que ninguém dava nada, eliminou três candidatos ao título e acabou por só cair na final onde esteve a maior parte do tempo empatada ou mesmo a ganhar, tendo forçado o prolongamento onde acabou derrotada. 

De qualquer forma o resultado foi espectacular...

Num certo sentido foi o oposto do Real Madrid em que houve anos em que tinha os melhores (e mais caros) jogadores do mundo e, no entanto, os resultados não era de nenhuma forma famosos.

É que o futebol é uma actividade muito complexa e, como tal, o importante é a equipa e o trabalho em equipa, mais do que os rasgos individuais.

Isto leva-nos à fúria que existe actualmente cá por Portugal com as classificações de serviço, baseadas na teoria de que um serviço (escola ou qualquer outro tipo de organismo) com trabalhadores excepcionais terá um desempenho excepcional.

Nada mais errado... o problema com a classificação de serviço é que esta deve começar por classificar os serviços deixando aos responsáveis pelo serviço a gestão da classificação dos seus funcionários em particular, como correr com as nódoas.

Mas,. não, faz-se uma guerra aos funcionários, ignorando o principal, isto é, o objectivo devia ser o funcionamento do serviço...

A ditadura europeia..

Segundo a Comunicação Social a chanceler alemã, uma tal Angela, eleita pelo povo alemão e o Presidente de França, um tal Sarkozy, eleito pelo povo francês reuniram-se e tomaram decisões que afectam todos os países da zona Euro e, por reflexo, de toda a EU.

Em especial convidaram Herman Van Rompuy, presidente do Conselho Europeu e que não foi eleito por ninguém, a presidir a um vago futuro órgão de governo económico da zona Euro.

Para já estamos em presença de uma derrota de Durão Barroso e ao lançamento da confusão nos órgãos dirigentes da UE pois este futuro órgão não tem competências, não foi previsto em nenhum Tratado e para fazer o que quer que seja tem de convencer a Comissão a propô-lo pois esta tem o exclusivo das propostas legislativas, pelo menos segundo os tratados...

Além de que não se entende como é que ideias destas venham de reuniões de dois líderes da UE, organismo que tem, se não baralho as contas, 27 líderes...

Grécia fora do Euro?

Uma sondagem revelou que 58% dos alemães querem a Grécia fora do Euro! (ver aqui).

Ahhh! e 45% dos franceses e dos ingleses são da mesma opinião.

É realmente o fim da democracia...

O jornal holandês AD escreve que o governo holandês está a considerar uma proposta que constitua um FMI europeu que tenha o poder de controlar a política económica dos estados europeus se a maioria dos lideres da eurozona o considerar necessário.

Resumindo, um país da eurozona pode ficar formalmente uma colónia de um qualquer organismo se uma maioria de líderes europeus o achar conveniente. Claro que a população do país visado não é tida nem achada no processo...

Já agora, uma pergunta, continuará a haver eleições?

Já ninguém acredita no Euro?

É curioso ler este artigo do Guardian.
Chama a tenção de uma realidade, os eurocepticos que não queriam o Euro, afinal, tinham razão... mas, e agora?

The eurozone: it's a pyrrhic victory for the euroceptics

• 
• Nick Cohen
• The Observer, Sunday 14 August 2011
• Article

Eurosceptics ought to be savouring a moment of triumph. Their fears about the euro have been justified by events. The euphoric hopes of their opponents now appear dangerous fantasies. Not since the collapse of communism has an argument been settled so decisively.

The notion that you could have a central bank without a central government to control it and impose a uniform interest rate on divergent economies is ridiculed everywhere. With an irony that not even the most jaundiced observer of human affairs could have predicted, a single currency that was meant to forge ever-closer union between European nations has succeeded only in inflicting ever-larger divisions between people who were rubbing along just fine before the euro arrived.

The Germans despise the Greeks and the Greeks despise the Germans. In the past everyone would have condemned the British, a high-minded dislike of British isolationism being a glue that held the EU elite together. Now Gordon Brown's decision to keep Britain out of the euro is looking wiser by the day. Far from being criticised for our failure to commit, we are, if anything, rather envied by "our fellow Europeans" – a phrase that, tellingly, the British rarely use. Politicians and economists report that European counterparts who formerly criticised them for being too hard on the euro now upbraid them for being too soft.

Each of the possible means of escape from the crisis succeeds only in rubbing home how the European elite has lost the trust of the governed. The political class promised northern Europeans that monetary union would not leave them liable for the debts of others. Now they are being told that they must either finance eurobonds or contribute to a bailout fund of such a size it would raise interest rates and possibly endanger the creditworthiness of France.

The betrayal of southern Europe is deeper. Greece, Portugal and Spain are countries that in recent memory had endured the squalor of fascistic and militaristic regimes. The European Union promised to allow them to break from the past and live as normal modern democracies. While the European Central Bank (ECB) held down interest rates to suit German needs, and easy money from China washed around the continent, they could borrow on German terms and aspire to German standards of living. Now they are stuck in a spiral of austerity and recession, and the euro prevents them attempting to free themselves from perpetual decline by devaluing their currencies.

"Technically I do not see how a country can leave the euro without incurring huge losses and enforcing extraordinary state controls," Simon Derrick, the chief currency strategist at the Bank of New York Mellon, told me, "but politically Europe cannot carry on as it is."

Most satisfying of all for eurosceptics has been the destruction of the smug and unwarranted notion that the triumph of the euro was inevitable, and those who criticised it were not honest opponents but cranks, reactionaries or worse. No one who saw it will quickly forget the advert made by Dutch supporters of the European constitution in 2005 . It showed images of the Holocaust, Srebrenica and the terrorist atrocities in Madrid, and implied that citizens who voted the wrong way in the referendum wanted to see Nazism and Serb nationalism return, or were doing radical Islam's work for it. In the minds of European politicians, opponents of European federalism were not mistaken or confused but wicked.

In Britain, too, support for the euro had little to do with economics, and became a badge that announced that one was a warm and caring person of broad sympathies, and an opponent of petty nationalism and racism. Moderate politicians supported the euro – Tony Blair, Ken Clarke, the Liberal Democrats. So too did the ploddingly centrist BBC, one of whose executives once explained eurosceptics to Rod Liddle, the editor of the Today programme, by saying: "Rod, the thing you have to understand is that these people are mad. " (Her outburst might have been less significant were she not the bureaucrat in charge of guaranteeing political impartiality.)

A little schadenfreude on the part of eurosceptics would seem to be in order. It is a measure of the depth of the trouble we are in that there is virtually no gloating at all.

Last week in his statement on the crisis, George Osborne said again that "the remorseless logic of monetary union leads from a single currency to greater fiscal integration". We have become so used to hearing it that we fail to notice the strangeness of a eurosceptic Tory chancellor begging Europeans to integrate faster and make the citizens of their rich countries pay for the debts of poorer countries without proper democratic controls on how their taxes are spent.

Osborne is panicking because the theories of what will happen if the EU tries to keep muddling on and a major European country defaults range from the alarming to the catastrophic. Liquidity would freeze, British banks' capital would be wiped out, Britain would go back into recession, orders for exports would vanish, tax receipts would collapse and the deficit balloon beyond control. To prevent a disaster, he must support a policy he has spent his career opposing.

I am not sure that even eurosceptics understand that their triumph has been pyrrhic precisely because they were against the consensus of otherwise sensible European politicians and bureaucrats. If they had been fighting marginal extremists, it would have been a different matter. As it was, they were up against an EU that ran economic policy without thinking about what do if the strains in the currency became too much, or if it imposed too much pain and trapped countries in perpetual austerity. It was not so much that it was heresy to criticise the euro in debates in Brussels about its future: there were no debates where challenges might be made, and, more seriously, no contingency plans.

Everyone likes to think of themselves as a free-thinking opponent of the stodgy status quo. But when the centre cannot hold, dissenters are as likely to be appalled as the most uncritical propagators of the received wisdom.

"I have been expecting the collapse of capitalism all my life," said the left-wing historian AJP Taylor during the social unrest and inflation of the early 1970s – a time disconcertingly like our own. "But now that it comes I am rather annoyed. There is no future for this country. You cannot realise how close we are to catastrophe." He might have been writing yesterday.

A Comissão europeia continua a ir aos nossos bolsos...

A Comissão Europeia, na sua fúria, está a preparar legislação que fará disparar os preços dos caminhos de ferro em toda a Europa.

Não se sabe quais as consequências para Portugal mas, ainda segundo o Daily Mail, para o Reino Unido, será uma subida de uns 50%...

Fury as Brussels attempts to raise OUR train fares by 50%

By GLEN OWEN

Last updated at 3:08 PM on 14th August 2011

Already beleaguered rail users are facing fare rises of 50 per cent, forced through by new regulations from Brussels.

The rules proposed by the European Commission would create a 'user pays' system - official jargon for passengers having to cover the entire cost of rail travel without any government subsidy.

If implemented, the policy would remove all British Government funding. At present, £4billion of taxpayers' money is ploughed into the rail network every year.

Under the new policy, the price of an annual season ticket between Sevenoaks and London, for example, would rise by £1,400 a year to £4,200.

The policy is outlined in the Commission's new Transport White Paper. 

Last night, Shadow Transport Secretary Maria Eagle said she had been horrified to discover the 'user pays' proposal in the Paper and condemned the Brussels plan as 'barmy'.

The EU Paper says member states should 'move towards full application of "user pays" principles to eliminate distortions, including harmful subsidies' in order to 'generate revenues and ensure financing for future transport investments'.

Labour has calculated that forcing passengers to find the difference from their own pockets after removing Government subsidy could lead to fares rising by up to half as much again.

It adds: 'In the future, transport users are likely to pay for a higher proportion of the costs than today.'

The paper also proposes a Single European Railway Area, which would lead to the abolition of 'technical, administrative and legal obstacles which still impede entry to national railway markets' and result in greater central control by the Commission.

Brussels is also advocating the increased use of road charges 'as an alternative way to generate revenue and influence traffic and travel behaviour.

'The long-term goal is to apply user charges to all vehicles and on the whole network to reflect at least the maintenance cost of infrastructure, congestion, air and noise pollution.'

The Paper suggests removing transport-related tax breaks, such as those given to company cars.

Britain's rail fares, which went up by an average 6.2 per cent this year, are already projected to continue to rise by more than the rate of inflation in the coming years as the Government's spending cuts bite deep into the Transport Department's budget.

Speaking out against the Commission's proposals, Ms Eagle said: 'There is little hope that Ministers will fight off this appalling plan from Brussels when the Tory-led Government is already shifting the cost of running the railways on to passengers.

'Over the next three years, commuters will see fares rise by as much as a third and many will end up paying a fifth of their salary just to get to work, more than they spend on their mortgage or rent.

'Now, this barmy EU plan risks pricing people off the railways altogether, adding to the congestion on Britain's roads.'

Labour's strong stance on the issue reflects an increasingly Eurosceptic mood within the party - an anti-Brussels attitude more usually associated with the Conservatives.

A European Commission spokeswoman said: 'These are just proposals and any measures would have to be agreed by national governments.'

A Transport Department spokeswoman chose not to comment directly on the Commission proposals but addressed the current fare rises. 

She said: 'The scale of the deficit means that the Government has had to take some very difficult decisions on rail fares, but this ensures that the major programme of investment in the railways that we are undertaking remains affordable.

'In the long term, we need to bring down the cost of our railways so that we can get a better deal for passengers and taxpayers. If we succeed, we hope to see the end of above-inflation rises in regulated fares.'

A Islândia e nós...

A Islândia é um país admirável... entrou em crise mas já a está resolver, o PIB está a crescer, o desemprego em queda etc.
É que a Islândia teve a inteligência de nunca aderir à UE e de não ter a moeda dita única.
Os nossos políticos fariam bem em olhar para a Islândia e explicar-nos porque é que eles estão bem e nós não!
Deixa-se aqui um video de ano novo feito para um programa da TV islandesa.

Notícias do "aquecimento global"

Da fria Gronelândia...

Vale a pela ler:

Pelosi, a Gronelândia e o aquecimento global