MB Civic

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2011 at 3:58 PM and filed under Americas (incl. Carribean), Economics, Foreign Affairs, Legal, Philosophy, Politics. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Skip to the end and leave a response. Trackbacks are closed.

2 Responses to “Argentina Shows World How to Beat the Crisis | Common Dreams”

1. Alexander Harper said:

   This article is a bit of a curate’s egg there are some good bits but actually you would need a few hundred pages to explain what has happened here so the article was inevitably a little superficial. A few bullet points:

   1.No mention of mind boggling levels of corruption which have prevented the country from doing a great deal better than it has.

   2. The official statistics are all fudged. They indicate a level of inflation of 9% p.a. while at the supermarket you are looking at closer to 25%. Argentina’s debt repayments are linked to the rate of inflation, therefore they are lying about it. As they are not allowing the peso to devalue vs the USD we actually have in excess of 20% inflation in USD. No joke.

   3. Freedom of the press is being seriously compromised in a systematic way as in Venezuela and Russia. Raids on opposition papers by the tax police, gendarmes etc are commonplace and the Government is now going to control the supply of newsprint effectively enabling them to suffocate any newspaper they don’t like.

   4. There is no widespread hostility to mining, the President’s home province of Santa Cruz is particularly mining friendly and it administers the system extremely well. The miners are providing 1000s of jobs, are strictly controlled from an evironmental standpoint and repatriate millions in forex.

   5. They have had a massive tail wind due to the commodities boom since 2003 without which their economic model would have collapsed. If the tail wind turns into a head wind things could get very nasty.

   Having said all this they have been progressive on many issues of which I approve and actually their form of controlled, crony capitalism is what all of us are going to get more of in the future as the centre of financial gravity shifts towards the creditor nations of the world such as China, India, Russia, where that economic model prevails.

   I agree that Argentina has probably shown the way ahead for a potential new order of economic governance and due to their colossal resource wealth they have managed not to implode but it’s not all a bed of roses and it is becoming increasingly less democratic and more authoritarian.

   Posted on 23-Dec-11 at 4:51 pm | Permalink
2. Michael Butler said:

   Thanks for such clarity.
   The world is becoming more authoritarian. If things are not more carefully done we will see increasing revolution which could become violent. Of course then things will become more repressive. What’s new?

   Posted on 23-Dec-11 at 5:09 pm | Permalink