Argentine cacerolazos* join Quebec cacerolazos**

since i gave up my place in buenos aires, i've been grossly negligent in posting on argentina... that doesn't mean, however, that i haven't been keeping up on argentina news... 

the on-going telenovela that is argentina is endlessly fascinating, particularly the exploits of its fashionista president, cristina fernandez de kirchner... cristina is a hoot and would be vastly amusing if she weren't leading a country of nearly 40 million people... she is in her second term following the two terms of her husband, nestor kirchner, who died unexpectedly midway through her first term... she won the last election with 54% of the vote and recently moved to shore up her populist credentials by nationalizing the ypf oil company and kicking out the principal shareholder, spain's repsol... but i've been wondering how long it would take argentines to grow tired of the inflation, corruption and general economic mismanagement that continues to be a hallmark not only of her presidency but of argentina governance in general, stretching back for generations... the straw that broke the camel's back was no doubt cristina's decree limiting u.s. dollar transactions, a decision that led to an enormous increase in capital flight... now, it looks like the good citizens of argentina have had it and have joined their quebecois brethren in making a joyful noise and returned to the street protests that characterized their response to the 2001 economic collapse ...


Pots and pans to protest corruption in Buenos Aires

Middle class Argentines protest with pots and pans against corruption, crime, inflation and the dollar clamp

For the third night in ten days angry Argentines took to the streets of Buenos Aires and other major cities banging pots and pans to protest corruption, rampant crime and insecurity, inflation and the dollar clamp in the midst of an economy that is showing clear signals of exhaustion and growing questions on the current course of affairs.

when i left buenos aires a year ago december, annual inflation was running over 28% and, from everything i've been reading, it hasn't slowed down a bit... i honestly don't know how ordinary argentines make it day-to-day in that economy... i first went there in 2004 and paid 5 pesos for a haircut and the peso-dollar exchange rate was 3-to-1... when i left in 2010, i was paying 25 pesos for a haircut and the exchange rate was 3.8-to-1... i have no idea what i would pay for a haircut today but i do know the exchange rate is now 4.4-to-1... one other thing i do know is that, in an attempt to "make it" financially, argentines cheat, lie, steal and stick it to each other as much as possible and when they're not sticking it to each other, they're REALLY sticking it to the tourists, which usually results in this...

Argentina rapidly becoming too expensive for foreign tourists

Argentina is rapidly becoming an expensive country for tourists and evidence of this is the declining number of tourists arriving in the country in the first months of the year while the number of Argentine travelling overseas is soaring, according to Mario Lielman, chair of the Buenos Aires Tourism and Travel Agencies Association.

i have a very warm spot in my heart for argentina and argentines but, as i've come to learn, argentina is, in many ways, its own worst enemy...

* A cacerolazo or cacerolada is a form of popular protest practised in certain Spanish-speaking countries – in particular Argentina, Chile and Uruguay – which consists in a group of people creating noise by banging pots, pans, and other utensils in order to call for attention. What is peculiar about this type of demonstration is that the people protest from their own homes, thus achieving a high level of support and participation.

** In 2012 in Québec, a province of Canada, citizens are currently using cacerolazo after the adoption on 18 May of Bill 78, an act which severely restricts rights to peacefully assemble. Bill 78 has raised the ire of the Quebec Bar Association, the Quebec Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International, and others. While court challenges are underway, the "Casseroles" or "Pots and Pans Demonstrations" continue nightly in towns and cities across the province, concentrated in Montreal's various neighbourhoods. This joyful Montreal video of Cacerolazo in action has gone viral: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/05/25/montreal-pots-and-pans-video-bill-78_n_1546694.html

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What a sorry state of affairs...! Just look at this grab-bag of shit...!

Looting Frenzies: Thinking about the Federal Reserve while Nursing a Cheap Beer

The Federal Reserve used to tell us how many dollars were in circulation, but in March of 2006, it stopped. A sane man would deduce that it wanted to hide how much inflation it was generating, but, no, this sudden opacity was merely a cost cutting measure, so explained the Fed, the profligate, money pumping Fed.

To grasp immediately how much your dollar has depreciated, look no further than the price of gold. In 1982, an ounce was less than $500. Now it has breached $1,800. Surging gold price also indicates that people are losing faith in their economic, political and social system, and that they fear the immediate future. When gold shoots up, this house is coming down. Wander into any Vietnamese or Cambodian neighborhood, you’ll see an inordinate number of jewelry stores selling gold. People who have been traumatized by war and dictatorship don’t trust in banks or even money, but only gold to help them survive any societal upheaval.

So if the dollar is sinking, why accumulate it? First off, foreign governments must have dollars to buy oil, since no country can sell petroleum for anything but the dollar. The only renegades to this rule are Iran and Venezuela. Accepting Chinese yuans for oil, they have constantly been threatened by Washington. If euros, yens, yuans or rubles were generally accepted for oil, the United States would quickly become irrelevant and no one would have to send us real products for our increasingly worthless paper.

This petro dollar arrangement is enforced by the U.S. military. As Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi have found out, America will rain bombs on your people’s heads if you try to escape from this racket. Gaddafi wanted to nationalize Libya’s oil fields. He also proposed a common currency for Africa. In their trade with each other, African countries could then be free from the tyranny of the dollar, but such insolence could not go unpunished. America will hold a gun to your head to make sure you go on biting its bucks.

but wait, there's more...

how interesting that THIS story never made any real headlines until AFTER the credit rating cut...

U.S. Inquiry Eyes S.& P. Ratings of Mortgages

The Justice Department is investigating whether the nation’s largest credit ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, improperly rated dozens of mortgage securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis, according to two people interviewed by the government and another briefed on such interviews.

The investigation began before Standard & Poor’s cut the United States’ AAA credit rating this month, but it is likely to add fuel to the political firestorm that has surrounded that action. Lawmakers and some administration officials have since questioned the agency’s secretive process, its credibility and the competence of its analysts, claiming to have found an error in its debt calculations.

matt taibbi talks about the whitewashing of the records of criminals...

Is The SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

meanwhile, in the uk...

The stench of a police state

The events of the last 12 days are a warning to the working class in Britain and internationally. The state repression and right-wing hysteria unleashed in response to youth rioting in London and other cities reveal the preparations of the ruling class for police-state forms of rule.

The riots were triggered by the police execution of Mark Duggan, a black 29-year-old father of four, in Tottenham, north London on August 4, followed by an unprovoked police assault on a peaceful protest over his killing two days later. Almost a fortnight later, no officer has been identified, let alone charged, for these crimes.

Instead, the political elites who sanctioned the looting of public funds to bail out the banks and the super-rich, and who covered up the illegal phone hacking of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, have sought to whip up a lynch mob atmosphere against the “criminality” and “immorality” of working class youth.

Cheered on by the Labour Party, Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative-Liberal Democrat government have organized vicious state repression, authorizing the use of water cannons and plastic bullets and the possible use of the army against further social unrest.

Basic democratic rights have been thrown to the winds. The presumption of innocence has been jettisoned as police carry out mass arrests, with those detained subject to show trials presided over by courts acting directly at the behest of the authorities.

Some 3,000 people, the majority aged between 16 and 24, have been rounded up in sweeps across the capital and elsewhere, with police battering down the doors of people’s homes for what are, in the main, petty misdemeanours. The names and photographs of people not even charged with any offence—let alone found guilty—are broadcast daily by the media. Juvenile defendants, some as young as 11, have been stripped of their right to anonymity.

naomi klein with more on the uk offers a very perceptive comparison to argentina...

Looting With The Lights On

Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford – clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a "state of siege" to restore order; the people didn't like that and overthrew the government.

Argentina's mass looting was called el saqueo – the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country's elites had done by selling off the country's national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge. But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these "entitlements"? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.

This is the global saqueo, a time of great taking. Fuelled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94% of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets". This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.

Of course London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious. The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

Cameron's response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.

before i sign off on this post, let's turn back to the u.s. and yet another (god save us all) shit-kickin' texan, governor goodhair (with deep thanks to the late molly ivins)...

Perry Reveals Plan for Total US Anarchy

Today, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) issued the first policy position of his presidential campaign by asking the White House to issue a “moratorium on regulations across this country”:

We’re calling today on the president of the United States to put a moratorium on regulations across this country, because his regulations, his EPA regulations are killing jobs all across America..

i simply can't describe the sinking feeling i get reading this kind of news... and, believe me, it's not made one whit easier reading it from here in kabul...

oh, well...

today's a day off (afghan holiday) and i'm kicking back and looking forward to going out to dinner this evening with a good afghan friend and his lovely wife... it'll be a nice break...

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Wow...! Argentina's Nestor Kirchner dies...!

and here i sit in buenos aires wondering why the day is so strangely quiet...


Nestor Kirchner

Former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner dies

Argentina's former President Nestor Kirchner has died, after reportedly suffering a heart attack.

Mr Kirchner, 60, who had been operated on in September for heart problems, died in the southern Argentine city of El Calafate, local media reported.

His wife, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, is the current president of the country.

Mr Kirchner served as resident from 2003 to 2007, and was being tipped to stand for election again in 2011.

He entered office after Argentina had seen a series of presidents come and go during a financial crisis 2001.

like so many who rise to the heights of political power, kirchner was obsessed with power and money... i was no fan but i concede that he did manage to pull the country out of its death spiral and did it with a flourish of populism all too rare in today's world... by the end of his second term, however, his true colors were abundantly clear and when he positioned his wife to succeed him - which she did in the 2007 election - i washed my hands of him... the fact that he was angling to get back into office in next year's election simply deepened my disgust...

all that said, however, even though i have decided to give up my place here, a place i have had for five years, argentina will always occupy a very soft place in my heart... as for nestor, may he rest in peace...

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Stubborn Argentina continues to shoot itself in the foot

honest to god... i LOVE that country but, fercryinoutloud, they desperately need to figure out how to get their ducks in a row... argentina has about as much potential both people and natural resource-wise as any country in the world but they also have this unparalleled ability to screw things up for themselves... here's a few samples of recent mostly unpleasant news... (yes, the post is a bit long but i'm making up for lost time... HA...!)

one year ago, the argentine government decided to re-nationalize the national airline, aerolíneas argentinas... it had been sold a number of years ago to the spanish firm, marsans, which, in typical privatization fashion, had operated it as a cash cow while letting everything deteriorate to unacceptable standards without investing a single peso in modernization, leaving a once proud carrier to become the butt of airline industry jokes...

and now...?

Argentina’s re-nationalized flag air carrier Aerolíneas Argentinas lost in July 48 million US dollars which is “a little bit more” than the same month a year ago when the company belonged to the Spanish tourism group Marsans, according to the company’s current CEO Mariano Recalde.

[...]

“In June 2008 revenue was 90 million US dollars and this year 50 million USD”, said Recalde adding that “June and July are the worst months for airlines in the southern hemisphere”, plus the fact that this year “we had a dramatic drop in winter tourism because of the A/H1N1 virus flu”.

Copyright © Colin Hunter

The July loss “just above 48 million USD” and an average red of “33 million USD” admitted by CEO Recalde, with average revenue of 50 million USD in June, are indicating that income is only covering between 50 and 60% of costs.

Nevertheless Recalde insisted in his optimism in the future of the company since “under government management all indicators of Aerolíneas have improved significantly”. He added that when the crisis “which is hitting all airlines of the world is over, revenue is going to increase considerably”

.
yeah, well, of course the airline was hit by the global economic downturn and the swine flu panic, but let's hope one of these days soon it can at least recover some of its dignity...

another big dynamic in argentina is that people simply do not trust their government... in fact, they don't even trust each other which, in my view, is simply an extension of the former... and is it any wonder...?

Workers at the government's National Institute of Statistics call it crass manipulation: Their agency, under pressure from above, altered socioeconomic data to reflect numbers palatable to the presidency. Inflation and poverty miraculously dropped, they said in interviews, and the economy boomed.

At least officially.

"They just erased the real numbers," said Luciano Belforte, an 18-year veteran at the institute. "Reality did not matter."

The alleged manipulation, which is under investigation by anti-corruption prosecutors, has angered Argentines. But in a globalized world, where a pensioner in Italy might be as likely to invest in Argentina as in Fiat, the suspected modifications are being felt far beyond this city.

[...]

Economists say the official inflation rate of 8.5 percent in 2007 was really about 25 percent. In the 12 months ended this June, the INDEC put the rate at 5.3 percent, but economists say it might be three times higher. Argentina's vaunted economic growth this decade might have been exaggerated, too. Credit Suisse said the 7 percent expansion the government reported last year is likely 2 to 3 percent lower.

[...]

The controversy has raised questions about the government's official poverty figure. The INDEC's calculation is 15.3 percent; the Catholic Church says it is closer to 40 percent. After Pope Benedict XVI called poverty in Argentina a "scandal" this month, the government acknowledged that as many as 23 percent of Argentines might be poor.

so, guess what that massive lack of people's trust in their government has led to... check this out...

Argentina’s flight of capital remains steady having reached 5.5 billion US dollars in the second quarter of the year, 11.2 billion in the first half and 43.1 billion US dollars since the second quarter of 2007, when the first signs of the global crisis, according to the latest data from the Argentine Central Bank.

However it has been below the peaks of the second quarter of 2008, when the farmers’ conflict with the Argentine government was at its highest point and at the end of last year when the Kirchner administration took over the private pensions’ savings funds.

The Central Bank also points out that some of the flight has been into hard currency deposits and “local corporations are using those funds to pay for the running of their businesses but from foreign accounts”.

Local economists point out that the deterioration of fiscal accounts, particularly the budget, and the possibility of a faster devaluation to help compensate the lack of revenue is making savers and companies put their monies in hard currency.

[...]

[E]conomics analyst centre Prefinex also believes that people fear the government will begin printing money to cover the fiscal deficit, which leads to a devaluation of the Peso and capital flight.

Econviews points out that the link between capital flight and a poor fiscal situation also worked inversely: lack of confidence encouraged capital flight which then generated less activity, less revenue and less fiscal abundance.

and it ain't only money that's leaving the country... here's some amazing statistics...

Over 800.000 Argentines left the country following the 2001 economic debacle, according to the latest report from the International Organization for Migration, which in the last decade represents 2.1% of total population.

[...]

Reference data shows that at the beginning of the XXth century an estimated 4.2 million immigrants from Italy, Spain, France and other European countries reached Argentina, but following a few years half of them returned. This means 2.2 million effectively remained in Argentina, which means that the exodus of the beginning of this century is equivalent to almost a third of that early last century massive influx.

However the latest data does not include the Argentines that have been forced to return because of the latest global economic crisis which has hit particularly hard Italy, Spain and the United States.

[...]

The local impact of this qualified emigration has been suffered by the Argentine private sector which has been forced to capacitate personnel and contract staff that can be reconverted.

how sad...

at least there's one bright spot...

Argentina paid creditors a total of 2.25 billion dollars on government-issued debt Monday, as it sought to shed the last vestiges of its 2001 default and return to the financial mainstream. Economy Minister Amado Boudou said the payment, or coupon, had been made to holders of dollar-denominated Boden 2012 bonds—meeting a debt obligation that aims to boost confidence.

"The coupon corresponding to Boden 2012 has been paid," said Boudou, adding that the country would now seek a return to global capital markets before the end of the year.

Argentina has been excluded from these markets since December 2001, when the country suffered an economic collapse wiping out personal savings, shredding government finances and prompting Buenos Aires to default on its debt.

In 2005 Argentina restructured its defaulted debt but there are still an estimated 20 billion dollars in holdouts plus a pending debt to the Paris Club of lenders of 6.5 billion. The country’s debt currently stands at 145 billion US dollars, plus the standing demands.

The Boden 2012 bond was issued in 2002 to compensate creditors who found access to their capital blocked during the 2001 freeze on bank withdrawals. It is estimated 65% of the bond issue is held outside Argentina and 35% locally.

i've been back in the u.s. since the end of may - too long... i'm getting itchy feet and my compass needle is pointing right at buenos aires where there will be signs of spring a'springin' within the next few weeks... unfortunately, it's likely i will be heading east to the balkans and back to afghanistan before i can once again enjoy the company of porteños...

like i say, i love argentina and the argentines but i sure wish they could figure out how to get their act together...

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Argentina is often its own worst enemy

i don't think i've talked to a single argentino who doesn't believe that another economic collapse is inevitable... so, what you see people doing is engaging in an orgy of grabbing-it-while-you-can, charging ever higher prices, hitting the already-struggling poor even harder, and virtually guaranteeing that there will be, in a perfect demonstration of a self-fulfilling prophecy, an eventual collapse...

the prudent folks take their money and either park it outside the country as the snippet below describes, or they plow it into tangible assets like home improvement or other forms of real estate... during the day, my neighborhood in buenos aires, like so many others, is a cacophony of hammering, sawing, and trucks delivering building materials...

now, there's also the impact of the global economic freefall...

An estimated 34 billion US dollars have fled from Argentina

The Argentine Central Bank must ensure that the flight of capital does not erode the “wealth of the country”, warned a former head of the bank, who revealed that since the beginning of the crisis 34 billion US dollars had fled from South America’s second largest economy.

“The capital flight process begun when institutional mistrust and legal insecurity took roots in the last quarter of 2007”, pointed out economist Rodolfo Rossi.

He added that Argentina at that time “lost 8.8 billion US dollars; 23.1 billion in 2008 and 5.7 billion so far this year”.

Rossi said that the Argentine Central Bank under its current president Martin Redrado has acted “with prudence”, but his job is not only “to preserve the Argentine peso stability but also impede the country’s wealth from fleeing”.

He estimated much of those funds are in security coffers of overseas accounts, mainly neighbouring Uruguay.

Rossi said that President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner conflict with the farmers was the milestone which triggered the flight to a “general mistrust” which was emphasized when the private pensions fund scheme was nationalized.

“This was further distorted by the naming of political appointees in the private pensions fund board of directors and disposing funds with certain degree of discretionarily plus the intention of nationalizing all deposits”, pointed out Rossi.

but wait, there's more... here's a sample of this week's headlines...

Argentina April car production and sales down 32% and 29%

Argentina’s 2008/09 crop exports forecasted to drop 56%

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Adrian Salbuchi, Argentine economist, 'splains the global financial meltdown for ya

good viewing and a pretty good explanation for exactly what we're seeing play out in front of our eyes, offered by someone who's lived through it himself during argentina's economic collapse in 2001...

An Argentine opinion on the Global Financial Crisis, describing the whole Global Financial System as one vast Ponzi Scheme. Like a pyramid, it has four sides and is a predictable model. The four sides are: (1) Artificially control the supply of public State-issued Currency, (2) Artificially impose Banking Money as the primary source of funding in the economy, (3) Promote doing everything by Debt and (4) Erect complex channels that allow privatizing profits when the Model is in expansion mode and socialize losses when the model goes into contraction mode.

Global Financial Collapse - Part 1



Global Financial Collapse - Part 2

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Was Argentina's 2001 economic collapse a preview of what's happening now worldwide?

this link takes you to a 12-part youtube video series on the 2001 economic collapse in argentina... living there, i of course had heard many of these stories but watching these clips brought it home to me in a way nothing else ever has...

i highly recommend watching these if for nothing else as a backgrounder to what's now taking place world-wide with potentially the same ramifications...

A documentary on the events that led to the economic collapse of Argentina in 2001 which wiped out the middle class and raised the level of poverty to 57.5%. Central to the collapse was the implementation of neo-liberal policies which enabled the swindle of billions of dollars by foreign banks and corporations. Many of Argentina's assets and resources were shamefully plundered. Its financial system was even used for money laundering by Citibank, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan. The net result was massive wealth transfers and the impoverishment of society which culminated in many deaths due to oppression and malnutrition.

here's part 1 to start you off...



i confess to having tears in my eyes as i watched this and felt the intense passion and anger of the people i've come to know and love holding forth for their country and what they believe in many of the same streets and plazas that i've walked myself...

(note: i've just watched the first 8 parts and i DARE you to watch them yourselves and not make the comparison to what is now happening in the G8 countries, particularly the uk and the u.s...)

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