Portugal consome 5% de nuclear, mas centrais no país ainda são tabu

[rmachado]

Mas serão alguns representativos da maioria?

é que bastam 50 para "armar um granel" que faz noticia...

De qq maneira é fraca a nossa comunicação social e não é de agora...

[PT_Trader]

Pata, já mudei de opinião quanto a isso.

Quanto mais rápido formos todos para o charco, melhor. Se é isso que se pretende, nós e outros países não precisamos de estar anos e anos nesta lenga lenga. Se é para rebentar, quanto mais cedo melhor.

[Pata-Hari]

ferradura, a imagem que se passa para fora é importante. Há duas guerras a ter: uma é com o nosso governo, que tem que gerir melhor e negociar melhor; outra é exactamente a externa, de manter a imagem de integridade e de alguma estabilidade por forma a manter-nos nos mercados.

Um canal no youtube com esse tipo de colectanea não leva a bem nenhum.

[ferradura]

A comunicação social também serve alguns interesses.
Afinal são eles que a controlam.
Por acaso viram algum jornalista a investigar os casos de corrupção ?
Não !
Por isso os jornais por cá definam.
As TV só mostram a miséria do casas de segredos, com gente do mais básico e mesquinho que pode haver.

Isso vai acontecer mais vezes.

Eu proponho até a criação no YOUTUBE de uma canal sobre estas manifes, QUE vão piorar.

[Hramos3]

Ver-go-nho-so. Não tenho mais palavras para descrever.

Ontem descobri pela internet que estava a haver pancadaria no parlamento, e nem um dos 4 canais de notícias falava no assunto. Muito menos os generalistas.

Ver-go-nho-so.

[assunoadr]

Deixou de ser o melhor povo do mundo!

Tem o melhor povo do mundo, a classe política que nos governa é que é a pior do mundo!

[pedrooa]

Deixou de ser o melhor povo do mundo!

Tem o melhor povo do mundo, a classe política que nos governa é que é a pior do mundo!

[_x_]

Deixou de ser o melhor povo do mundo!

[Pata-Hari]

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October 15, 2012


Backlash Grows Against Austerity Plan in Portugal

By RAPHAEL MINDER


LISBON — Portugal has long been regarded as a role model in the grinding euro zone crisis. In return for an international bailout, its government cut services and raised taxes while its people patiently endured with little of the popular outcry seen elsewhere in southern Europe.

That is, until now.

Suddenly, the Portuguese have joined the swelling ranks of Europe’s discontented, following Greece and Spain, after the government tried to take one step further up the austerity path last month. For many here, it was one step too far, driving tens of thousands into the streets last month in the largest protest of Portugal’s crisis.

As Pedro Passos Coelho, Portugal’s center-right prime minister, prepares to announce a new budget on Monday — filled with still more steep tax increases and public sector job cuts — he abruptly faces the kind of popular backlash that was, until recently, strikingly absent from the political and social landscape here.

Taking a page from the playbook of their Spanish neighbors, protesters are planning to encircle the Parliament building for the budget announcement. For their part, Portugal’s powerful trade unions are preparing a general strike for Nov. 14. Arménio Carlos, the leader of the CGTP union, compared Mr. Passos Coelho to Pinocchio, accusing him of constantly changing his austerity message.

“It’s clear that the amount of good faith the government enjoyed has been turned into large skepticism and distrust,” said Pedro C. Magalhães, a professor of politics at the University of Lisbon.

For a government that has assiduously followed the belt-tightening prescriptions of its international lenders — who rewarded Portugal with a €78 billion, or $101 billion, bailout — it has been a rude awakening to the risks of austerity, which has even strained the governing coalition between Mr. Passos Coelho’s Social Democrats and the rival Popular Party.

Many here feel the government had taken the compliance of its population for granted.

The turning point came in September when Mr. Passos Coelho offered up a plan to redistribute social security funds by cutting employers’ social security taxes while significantly raising those of employees. Although the measure was meant to lower labor costs, it put employers on the spot while the outcry from workers was so ferocious that he was soon forced to withdraw the proposal.

But the damage was done. The misstep is now credited with having rattled the social and political cohesion that had underpinned Portugal’s painful but steady progress on the austerity route.

The ill-fated plan left citizens, who had once grudgingly accepted the pain of austerity, with a new sense of empowerment, Mr. Magalhães said. “The fact that the government backed down and the fact that no catastrophe or international censure came out of it suddenly shows that there are no inevitabilities,” he said.

Carlos Moedas, secretary of state to the prime minister and in charge of overseeing Portugal’s bailout program, said the reversal was “part of the journey” for any government forced to make significant adjustments in return for a bailout.

“I don’t think there was anything too exceptional in what happened,” Mr. Moedas said. “The fact that we came back on our decision had absolutely nothing to do with people coming out on the streets and everything to do with the fact that we got to understand that the ones who were supposed to be the beneficiaries actually did not want the measure.”

Still, the prime minister has been left struggling to regain the confidence of the public. The effort has been clumsy at best, his critics say. Many felt insult was added to injury when the government subsequently suggested that employers should not only lower their labor costs but their prices as well.

“We are at a low point in our relationship because a government seriously damages its credibility when it doesn’t take the pulse of the real economy before coming up with new measures,” said João Vieira Lopes, the president of the Portuguese Commerce and Services Confederation, which represents about 200,000 companies in sectors ranging from transport to retail.

Indeed, after watching helplessly while their economy shrank, many Portuguese are now openly challenging the austerity prescription as the wrong medicine for the malaise.

Mr. Vieira Lopes suggested that the fundamental problem was that the bailout assistance program from Portugal’s international lenders did not take sufficiently into account the specifics of the nation.

“The austerity model has been applied rather mechanically,” he said. “This is not a country full of big companies that can adjust to a decline in their domestic market but rather small and medium-sized companies whose only option is then to close down.”

Many stores in central Lisbon are now either closed or advertising huge discounts, as citizens struggle in a deepening recession that has pushed unemployment to a record 15 percent. A sharp rise in the sales tax has decimated the restaurant sector, including well-known venues like Bocca and Manifesto.

One measure of the hardship has been the sudden proliferation of the “marmita,” or lunch box, used by employees to take their home cooking to work. Even the investment banking division of Banco Espirito Santo, one of Portugal’s largest financial institutions, recently refitted a room with tables, refrigerators and microwaves to accommodate the trend.

“My main competition is now the number of people who bring their own food from home,” said Anabela Cristos, 54, who lost her job at a real estate company in 2010 but this year started a vegetarian food business, Vegetalicias, that sells quiches and salads to Internet entrepreneurs working in Startup Lisboa, a building in the heart of the Portuguese capital. “The crisis has almost turned this into a fashion,” she said.

As consumer spending falls, so too are tax revenues. As part of its 2012 budget, the government anticipated that sales taxes would produce revenues 11.6 percent higher than in 2011. Instead, revenues were down 2.2 percent in the first eight months of this year, as the tax increases slow the economy.

While Mr. Moedas attributed the fall in part to a positive shift by Portuguese companies toward exporting rather than selling their goods at home, the growth in exports is expected to taper off next year as the recession spreads across Europe.

This month, the International Monetary Fund predicted that Portugal would remain in recession next year, with the economy likely to contract 3 percent this year and a further 1 percent in 2013.

Still, Abebe Selassie, the I.M.F. mission chief for Portugal, said by phone from Washington that “it would be a mistake not to recognize the progress that has been made so far in Portugal despite stronger adverse negative shocks than assumed when we started the program.”

In particular, he added, “the Portuguese have been putting in place their program even in the face of strong headwinds from other parts of Europe,” especially from recession-hit Spain.

Like Spain, Portugal has recently been granted an additional year to meet previously agreed deficit targets, meaning that Monday’s budget must allow Portugal to lower the deficit to 4.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2013 from an anticipated 5 percent this year.

Portugal also recently managed to postpone the repayment of part of its debt after reaching a debt swap agreement with investors, which Mr. Moedas described as “a very important step toward getting again total access to the markets.”

But the immediate concerns for Mr. Passos Coelho are on his doorstep. The aftermath of the social security reversal may be lasting, warned António Vitorino, a former Socialist minister and European commissioner. “Such a political mistake can have permanent consequences when it hits a society that is already in a state of clear austerity fatigue,” he said.