14 de março de 2008

Sinais da globalização

Há alguma coisa na tese deste livro, The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, criticado na Salon Books - mais que não seja dá conta de um sinal dos tempos. Dois excertos: um, para sintetizar a tese; dois, uma referência a um jantar na casa de um ministro do Chile (gostei desta):


"Rothkopf's credible, if not especially original argument in 'Superclass' is that over the past several decades a 'global elite' has emerged whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments. They schmooze regularly at conferences like Davos, go to the same schools, serve together on corporate and nonprofit boards, and above all do business with each other constantly -- to the point that they have become a kind of culture in themselves, a 'class without a country,' as Rothkopf puts it. Furthermore, these people are 'the new leadership class for our era.'"


"Taking a dinner party at the home of Chile's finance minister, Andres Velasco, as an example, Rothkopf describes his uneasy response to the oligarchs around him. He realizes that they embrace the market-oriented philosophy of the "Chicago Boys," Milton Friedman's University of Chicago disciples, but only so long as the attendant suffering is limited to Chile's lower classes. They quietly resist reforms that might nibble away at their iron control of the nation's industries. "While many of the most powerful people in the country embrace 'progress,'" Rothkopf observes of Chile, "they use their energy and political capital primarily on behalf of the changes that benefit them most directly. Elites in Chile have implicitly or explicitly resisted the changes that might create more competition, more entrepreneurship, more access to capital for the poor and middle classes." As a result, though Chile is touted as Latin America's great economic success story, profound inequities in its society have gone comparatively unchanged."

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