What would the US Bailout look like in Argentina?
Posted on | November 7, 2008 |
Read Naomi Klein’s Story “The New Trough” in Rolling Stone.
The picture on the Rolling Stone page says it all. Except that the money the pigs are eating is our social security, our investment plan for a green economy, and our health care coverage. This men deserve to be hung in public.
As I read it, I couldn’t help but think of the images from the financial crisis in Argentina. When the banks announced they had no money and stole people’s savings, there were massive lines at the banks, people rioted in the streets and the government was overthrown. Several times. Here, as we hand out 700 billion dollars to the greedy bastards who created this mess (and give themselves billions of it to themselves as bonuses), we sit at home and hope for change.
I asked one smart individual who follows the news carefully about it several weeks ago. I was incensed about the package even then, but he said, “we gotta save the economy, they gotta do it.” I didn’t respond.
Who’s economy? Goldman Sach’s? Mellon’s? Jeffery’s? Ours?
If our media was doing it’s job, Bush could not slip behind the smoke screen of the election and we might get mad. What would happen if thousands showed up at the doors of our banks and shouted for our money? What would be different about this government if we stood in front of the White House and demanded George and Henry (kingly sounding names, aren’t they) don’t give the richest thieves in the country our tax money?
Our country might look like Argentina did. The incomes government might do something radical like take the money back from the thieves. President Cristina Kirchner of Argentina just today managed to nationalize the pension system in her country. There are other concerns of course, but in essence she took back for the people what the IMF and the neo-liberals stole in the 1990s.
Footnote: The picture on Al Jazeera, you might notice, if of people protesting the nationalization. I can’t speak to that. I would like to know what sectors of society are protesting and why. There is concern about how the government will use the money (pay off IMF debts!?), but I still contend the idea of putting the people’s money in the political system representative of the people is better than grafting it off to corporations and individuals.
Like Klein says, are we not nationalizing in this bailout, we are privatizing. It will be very hard for us to get this money back. I think the people should simply seize the CEO’s house and bank account. That should be equivalent to a city’s worth of retirement funds.
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November 7th, 2008 @ 10:49 am
This is a chat I had with Dave K. He is a PhD in economics.
Dave: yeah its a shame the hacks these guys all are like a mutual aid society for fuckers
on the other hand I have been getting this warm glow when I read in the paper who’s being considered to advise on econ in the new obama administration
me: yea, advise on the money that Bush stole and gave to his buddys
who are they? I have only read about the chief of staff
Dave: he hasn’t made any appts yet (as of yday, I haven’t read todays news yet)
but the frontrunners are a big step up
Dave: check this out for example
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e110fed2-ac3d-11dd-bf71-000077b07658.html
Dave: obviously there’s a real double standard being applied
Dave: my criticism at the time was that blame for the failure of IMF reforms was placed on the argentine govt for not implementing those reforms correctly, which was a political problem
me: that’s not true though
Dave: and it was basically an assertion that “we’ll lend you the money, and we want you to make these structural reforms”, and you need to figure out the politics of how to do that
me: argentina was the most radical in applying the reforms. they went further with the IMF prescriptions to privatize, sell off the state, and downsize government than any other government being delt with by the IMF and they paid the biggest price for doing so
Dave: yeah
Dave: but what I mean is that the global lenders rely on a model of how the world works in which they basically rely on some untested popular academic theory, let a country like Argentina take the risk of testing it out, and when it fails, they blame Argentina for not doing it right
me: oh, of course. and they let the poor guinea pigs fail. they were the victims. other countries, like Brazil, were deemed to important to fail and got bailed out. Mexico just ratified NAFTA and was too important a trade partner, so Clinton put together 50 million, or billion I don’t remember, in just a couple of days to keep their currency and economy from collapsing. Argentina didn’t account too much in trade or in size, so it got to fail, it’s middle class fell out of the bottom, landed on the streets as Papeleros (trash/paper collectors) and now the country is trying to deal with the after effects, like privatized pensions that are filling the coffers of some insurance company or fat cat.