More on Argentina
Im not that knowledgeable as others on this list about these matters, but an interesting sidelight for me has been the reported role played by the Bush administration which has, in effect, inadvertently (or perhaps not so inadvertently) run interference for the Argentineans. North American football fans will recognize this as the expression which describes how big linemen clear the way for smaller running backs to skirt past the opposition. The US doesnt reportedly want to see a big IMF bailout of the banks; its Britain, Japan, and Italy who do. The conservative Republicans apparently have decided to draw the line here as concerns moral hazard the breakdown of lending self-discipline by the banks confident that governments and international financial institutions (IFI's)like the IMF will always be there to bail them out in the case of debt default. Paul ONeil, the former Treasury Secretary, was keen that if the banks wanted to speculate in risky emerging market debt, they should expect, as speculators, to be subject to the discipline of the market without expecting government/IFI relief. Leaving aside whether this is actually how the system works, the Kirchner government has taken advantage of this emergent US view to deepen the ideological split within the IMF. The FT article I referred the list to yesterday quoted the Argentinas economy minister Roberto Lavagna as follows: I agree that you must not use the money of American plumbers and carpenters or German dentists to bail out Argentina, Turkey or any other country. But if you take that decision many other things have to happen too. One of those things, he says, is that the world has to get used to lower debt-recovery levels. the FT article continues. And quotes Lavagna again: That is the reality. It was not Argentina's decision. It was the US's, and it means we have to carry out a restructuring deal with our own resources. The opponents of the US line cite Lavagna's stance, of course, as an example of how this approach just encourages defaults and bankruptcies and debt reductions by poorer nations, knowing that theyre not going to be subject to US heavy pressure to pay up. They say this ultimately puts the big banks and by extension the worlds financial system at risk, and these are simply too big to fail. The banks, of course, have always used this Cassandra cry to their advantage. Anyone else have any further information or special insights to offer about this reported ideological split? Todays FT report on Argentinas decision to pony up an IMF repayment, as had mostly been expected, follows. Marv Gandall Argentina agrees to meet IMF debt deadline By Adam Thomson Financial Times March 10 2004 Argentina on Tuesday agreed to make a $3.1bn payment to the International Monetary Fund, narrowly avoiding what would have been the biggest single default in the fund's history.The move broke a deadlock between President Nstor Kirchner's government and the IMF. Argentina is already in default with its private creditors after the country stopped servicing almost $100bn of debt in December 2001.It is expected IMF management will recommend that the fund's board members formally approve Argentina's second review under the current standby programme. Formal approval, expected within about two weeks, would unlock funds about equivalent to yesterday's payment. Argentine investors expressed relief at the agreement. The peso strengthened against the dollar while Argentine stocks and bonds were also higher. But there was no reaction in global markets, where some kind of deal had been expected. Global markets have generally been immune to this crisis, perhaps foolishly so, said Guillermo Estebanez, emerging markets currency strategist at Banc of America Securities. The agreement comes as the IMF searches for a new managing director after Horst Khler, the fund's current head, resigned last week after he was proposed as Germany's next president.Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg's prime minister, said on Tuesday he would back the nomination of Rodrigo Rato, Spain's economy minister, to spearhead global attempts to head off financial crises. Details of how the IMF and Argentina broke the impasse were unclear on Tuesday afternoon. But people close to the negotiations told the Financial Times that Argentina had agreed to several IMF demands over the country's treatment of its private creditors. The most important of these is that Argentina should agree to enter formal negotiations with its private creditors to restructure the country's defaulted sovereign debt. Until now, Argentine authorities have gone out of their way to avoid using the word negotiation and, according to creditors, have done everything possible to delay the process. As part of the deal, Argentina will formally recognise the Global Committee of Argentina Bondholders (GCAB), a group claiming to represent institutional and retail investors holding about $37bn of defaulted Argentine bonds
IMF-Argentina: from bully to weakling
Argentina helps keep up facade By coming to a last-minute deal with Buenos Aires, the International Monetary Fund has avoided showing how powerless it really is Charlotte Denny and Larry Elliott Thursday March 11, 2004 The Guardian It was like a boxing match which goes to the final bell on Tuesday evening in Washington as the two sides in the long drawn-out battle between Argentina and the International Monetary Fund withdrew to their corners, punchdrunk. Both were telling the judges, the world's media, that they had won on points. At almost the last moment, Argentina had stumped up the $3.1bn (£1.7bn) it owed the Fund - on the face of it a victory for the Washington-based lender, the country's last remaining financial lifeline. But Buenos Aires said it had only signed the cheque after securing a promise from the Fund of further lending without new and more stringent conditions. The strings the Fund was hoping to attach involved the $90bn Argentina owes to private-sector creditors. The country has been offering to repay just 25 cents in every dollar borrowed, an offer seen as unacceptable by the IMF. Further lending, the Fund said, was conditional on Argentina negotiating in good faith with its private-sector creditors. Having slugged it out for days, at the post-match press conferences yesterday it was time to kiss and make up. The last minute telephone call from the IMF's acting director, Anne Krueger, to Argentina's president, Nestor Kirchner which clinched the deal with just hours to go before the deadline was cordial and respectful, a presidential spokesman said. Both sides have made face-saving concessions. Argentina yesterday signed a new agreement with the Fund, conceding to several of its demands over the treatment of private creditors. The IMF said its agreement with Argentina included a specific course of action for negotiations with creditor groups and a tentative timetable for the talks. Argentina's economy minister Roberto Lavagna made it clear however that Argentina's September offer to repay private creditors 25 cents in the dollar still stood. Tellingly, groups representing investors in Argentinian debt were less impressed with the commitments the IMF has secured on their behalf. Argentina and the Fund are making the best fist of what is a situation fraught with danger for both. Mr Kirchner has staked his reputation on standing up to the IMF and had to take the fight to the wire in order to maintain his populist credentials. But he had to weigh up the risks of triggering the largest ever default to the Fund. Failing to make its IMF payment would have relegated Argentina to the bottom league of creditworthy countries, alongside Sudan, Zimbabwe and Somalia, putting at risk future borrowing on world capital markets. When Argentina defaulted to its private creditors in December 2001 it triggered a financial crash during which the country's economy shrunk by a fifth. The resulting political and social chaos saw four occupants of the presidential palace in a month, unemployment of more than 20% and half of Argentinians falling below the poverty line. While the short-term impact would undoubtedly be painful, Mr Kirchner could have gambled that the capital markets would eventually open their lending books again to one of the world's most important developing economies. The lesson from the Russian debt default in September 1998 is that if a country is big enough, investors will come back. Capital markets have short memories, admits one IMF official. The Fund is usually portrayed as having the upper hand in negotiations. Argentina's debts are, however, so big that a default would have a damaging effect on the Fund's balance sheet. Of the $95bn in outstanding loans to the Fund, Argentina accounts for 15%. The Fund says it would be forced to charge other borrowers higher rates to make good its losses. That threat seems unlikely to be realised, given that two other countries, Brazil and Turkey, account for a further 57% of its loans portfolio. Higher borrowing charges would risk tipping two more countries into default. More likely the Fund would have to turn to its major shareholders, the rich countries of the west, for a cash injection. For the Fund, the confrontation with Argentina risked exposing the confidence trick on which its role as the world's financial fireman has been built. In reality, there is not enough money in its coffers to rescue a country facing imminent bankruptcy, which is why the Asian countries burnt by the series of financial crises of the late 1990s have decided to build up their own foreign exchange reserves instead. Argentina did the Fund a favour by not unmasking the illusion. But in the long term, the only solution is a proper mechanism for sharing the burden of dealing with sovereign bankruptcies more equally between the stakeholders, as Ms Krueger has argued. When she first advanced the plan, just months before Argentina spiralled into crisis in late 2001
Argentina v IMF: another round of the game of chicken
Argentina and IMF in duel over $3.1bn loan Larry Elliott and Charlotte Denny Tuesday March 9, 2004 The Guardian Argentina was last night on a collision course with the International Monetary Fund after the heavily indebted Latin American country signalled it was preparing to default on a $3.1bn (£1.7bn) payment to the Washington-based lender. In the biggest trial of strength between the fund and a debtor country in the fifty-year history of the global lender, the crisis will come to a head today when Buenos Aires must decide whether to pay the fund. The dispute is not really over the $3.1bn - the fund promised last October to rollover its outstanding loans to the country, so Argentina does not have to make any net repayments this year to Washington. Argentina also owes $90bn to banks and private investors in Europe and North America. It has made no payments on these debts since December 2001, and the fund is insisting the country negotiates a fair deal with its private creditors before extending its credit line. I don't think Argentina is going to pay us without there being a commitment from us and the board will not give it that, an IMF source told Reuters last week. So, Argentina has a choice: to pay us and take their chances or continue playing hardball. Latin America's second largest economy is only just recovering from a slump caused by following the fund's advice throughout the 1990s, but is now being pressed by its private sector creditors to start making repayments on its enormous debt. So seriously is Buenos Aires taking these threats that President Nestor Kirchner cancelled a trip to Europe earlier this year on his official jet, Tango One, afraid it could be seized as collateral by aggrieved bondholders. Mr Kirchner is taking a huge gamble. His stance is winning applause from Argentina's hardpressed population, but the confrontation with the fund could end in the country becoming a financial pariah. Argentina has been living in a false honeymoon, paying no interest, but the creditors are banging on the door, said Professor Marcus Miller of Warwick University. Mr Kirchner and economy minister Roberto Lavagna have offered creditors 25¢ in the dollar. Any more, they argue, would force them to cut spending on schools and hospitals. The creditors are demanding 65¢ in the dollar and say Argentina can afford to pay them, now the country is enjoying healthy growth. Discussions between the two sides have been deep frozen for months, but the departure last week of the IMF's managing director Horst Köhler is likely to bring the crisis to a head. Standing in as acting chief is Anne Krueger, the fund's deputy director, who is likely to take an uncompromising line over how much Argentina can afford to pay. Ms Krueger's tough love stance is receiving backing from some of the fund's leading shareholders, the rich countries of the West. The issue has already split the group of seven industrialised countries: in a rare revolt against the rest of the G7, Britain, Italy and Japan all abstained from rolling over Argentina's lending programme last January. There are three possible ways out of the current impasse: either Argentina capitulates and offers creditors a better deal; the fund backs down and continues its lending programme despite Buenos Aires's intransigence or a compromise is agreed. Prof Miller says the impasse could be resolved without harming Argentina's recovery. Buenos Aires should float new bonds with returns linked to the performance of its economy to repay its creditors. If the economy grows strongly over the next few years, creditors will get a slice of the action without starving other parts of the economy. Argentina likes the idea of growth linked bonds but Mr Kirchner has ratcheted up the rhetoric so it will be difficult give creditors a break. For the fund, however, Argentina's defiance raises the ultimate spectre: a domino effect of defaulters that could bankrupt it.
Re: Argentina:; protection rackets and busted binaries
Politicians almost invariably disappoint me, failing to meet even my new expectations. Kirschner may be an exception. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Argentina:; protection rackets and busted binaries
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ In Argentina, the law and lawless seen to merge By Reed Lindsay, Globe Correspondent, 1/24/2004 BUENOS AIRES - Police Corporal Mariano Lewicki has made a habit of looking over his shoulder. Seated in an upscale cafe in a suburb north of Buenos Aires, the 31-year-old glanced nervously at passing waiters and a handful of other customers. In the past three years, he said, he has been knifed on a train, threatened at gunpoint in his house, and beaten and burned with cigarettes in a police station. Such is the price one pays for turning on one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Argentina: maldita policia, literally ``the damned police,'' a network of corrupt officers that patrols the dense urban sprawl in Buenos Aires Province, which surrounds the capital. In April 2000, Lewicki blew the whistle on a ranking officer, whom he suspected of masterminding a bank robbery. Within two weeks, Lewicki was charged with driving a stolen car, suspended indefinitely from the police force, and thrown in jail for two months. The band of corrupt police is the biggest mafia in the country,'' according to Ricardo Ragendorfer, who has written two books on the abuses of the Buenos Aires provincial police. The police profit from every crime in the penal code. The narcotics police deal drugs, the police in charge of auto thefts steal cars, the police that deal with robberies rob, and so on,'' Ragendorfer said. ``In other countries in Latin America, parts of the police force are on mafia payrolls. Here, it's the other way around.'' Not even the president, it seems, is immune from the gangster-like tactics of the corrupt officers. Within days of publicly accusing the Buenos Aires provincial police of complicity in a recent spate of kidnappings, President Nestor Kirchner told reporters that his family had received threats. Kirchner has coasted relatively unscathed through his first eight months as president of this crisis-torn nation, winning popular support by leading an assault on an entrenched political elite dominated by his own Peronist party. But analysts say his attack on corruption in the Buenos Aires provincial police could be his riskiest initiative yet. The move also threatens to unleash a power struggle within the political party that brought Kirchner to the presidency and that, until now, has provided him with critical support. The profits the provincial police receive from rake-offs and direct participation in criminal activities provide a major source of funding for the Peronist party, the dominant force in Argentine politics, according to former police officers and political analysts. For the first time since Kirchner assumed the presidency, a rift appears to have developed between him and former president Eduardo Duhalde, a Peronist who once called the Buenos Aires provincial police ``the best in the world'' while governor of the province in the 1990s. Most of the province's 14 million people and around half of its 46,000 police officers are concentrated in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, a vast urban area with triple the capital's population. Once an industrial belt, the area is now a slum-strewn haven for organized crime that has been swept by a spate of headline-grabbing kidnappings. The abductions, unabated crime, and poverty have provoked protests and marred Kirchner's efforts to convince a wary public that Argentina is finally recovering from the worst economic depression in its history. Analysts say the protests have served as a wake-up call for the new administration, which has assigned blame to the very police force charged with fighting the kidnappers. ``In the majority of the kidnappings, police have been discovered, and many times, police from Buenos Aires Province,'' Kirchner said in November. ``Argentines are waiting for a profound purging of that police force.'' He added: ``If 10 have to go, then 10 will go. If 100 have to go, then 100 will go.'' According to Marcelo Sain, former deputy minister of security in the province of Buenos Aires, the provincial police have been profiting from illegal activities such as prostitution, gambling, quack medicine, and other miscellaneous, nonviolent crimes for decades. But since the 1990s, the police have become increasingly involved in violent crimes, such as drug trafficking, kidnappings, car thefts, and armed robberies. The police have also been accused of recurring human rights abuses, including tortures, extrajudicial executions, and the unnecessary shootings of suspected criminals as well as innocent bystanders, a practice dubbed ``easy trigger.'' The provincial police force is technically under the purview of Governor Felipe Sola, a Peronist, not the president. But Kirchner has nonetheless made his influence felt. Last month, Sola accepted the resignation of his security chief, who was seen as a political ally of Duhalde and as an opponent to reforming the police force. The shake-up was interpreted
protection rackets redux; Argentina
[Los Angeles Times] 2000 Argentina Bribe Scandal Reopens After New Confession By Héctor Tobar Times Staff Writer December 14, 2003 BUENOS AIRES - A congressional official's emotional confession in a report published Saturday has reopened one of Argentina's most notorious scandals, shedding light on the behind-the-scenes dealings that doomed a president and set off years of political instability. In an interview with Buenos Aires magazine TXT, former Senate Secretary Mario Pontaquarto described how he personally delivered a $5-million bribe to nine senators at the behest of President Fernando de la Rua in April 2000. The money, Pontaquarto said, was provided from the Argentine intelligence service's secret funds and delivered in two briefcases to senators of the nation's dominant political parties, the Radicals and the Peronists. I asked him why me, why couldn't someone else do this, Pontaquarto told TXT, remembering the moment a senator told him he would be the go-between delivering the money. But I didn't turn him down. They were telling me it had to be done, the government needed it to be done. Pontaquarto spoke to the magazine three weeks ago and repeated his story late Friday to a judge investigating the case. He has been granted immunity from prosecution, and the judge has called his testimony convincing and very precise. Several senators were named as defendants when the scandal first broke in 2000, but over the years all charges in the case had been dropped for lack of evidence. The charges could be reinstated, however, as a result of the new testimony. The bribery allegations split De la Rua's ruling center-left coalition. Frustrated with De la Rua's apparent unwillingness to pursue the case, Vice President Carlos Alvarez resigned and his leftist Frepaso movement left the government. The weakened De la Rua was himself forced from office amid rioting and protest in December 2001. The alleged bribes bought yes votes for a business-backed employment reform law demanded by the International Monetary Fund but which faced strong resistance from organized labor and its allies in the Argentine Congress. Elected president in 1999, De la Rua inherited a country that was burdened with a growing public debt and was increasingly dependent on IMF loans. The IMF insisted that Argentina implement reforms. De la Rua denied Saturday that he authorized bribing anyone, calling the accusations absolutely false. He accused current President Nestor Kirchner's government of planting the story as part of a political operation against him. Kirchner's government announced that it has provided protection to Pontaquarto - who says he fears for his life - and has helped his family seek refuge abroad. Presidential Cabinet chief Alberto Fernandez said Kirchner had been aware of Pontaquarto's confession for several days before its publication. Those who are responsible must fall, Fernandez said. Pontaquarto was the highest-ranking bureaucrat in Congress, a 20-year functionary who had won the trust of the legislature's many factions. Despite media reports naming him as a likely conduit for the suspected bribes, he had always denied involvement. In the TXT interview published Saturday, he describes the bribery episode as a cloak-and-dagger operation that included visits to the president's office and to a vault inside the Argentine intelligence agency, known by its Spanish initials, SIDE. Argentina's powerful labor movement had been pressuring lawmakers for months to vote against the law that, among other things, made it easier for businesses to dismiss employees. Pontaquarto says that at that point, he was summoned to the president's office for a meeting with a small group of key senators. Classical music was playing loudly in the background - apparently, the president feared his office might be bugged, Pontaquarto said. Something more was needed to pass the law, one of the senators said. Arrange it with Santibanes, the president responded, referring to his intelligence chief, Fernando de Santibanes. A few weeks later, Pontaquarto was summoned to a meeting with the intelligence chief. He was told to return later that evening to pick up the money. Inside the vault, he was given two briefcases, Pontaquarto told TXT. After placing them in his car, he drove to Congress, a SIDE security escort trailing behind him. But some complications arose, he said, and he ended up hiding the money in his house for a few days before turning most of it over to Sen. Emilio Cantarero, a Peronist. Pontaquarto said he watched in the senator's apartment as the lawmaker counted the bills. When he was done, Cantarero handed him a list detailing how he and other Peronist senators would divvy up the bribes, Pontaquarto said. He told me to keep it as a receipt, Pontaquarto said, adding that he hid it in a secure place. He said he delivered the second briefcase to Radical Party Sen. Jose Genoud, then provisional president of the Senate.
Argentina: playing chicken
Who will blink first - Argentina or its creditors? Reuters, 12.11.03, 10:22 AM ET By Hugh Bronstein and Brian Winter NEW YORK/BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Call it an $88 billion game of chicken. On one side is Argentina, the proud and once-prosperous nation that two years ago staged the biggest sovereign debt default in history. On the other are the country's jilted bondholders, appalled by the government saying it can repay no more than 25 cents on the dollar. The investors, asking 65 cents for every dollar they lent, are forming a global committee to negotiate a restructuring. But, despite the assumptions that Wall Street makes about the way defaulters must behave in order to reestablish credit, Argentina may go forward with an offer sure to be rejected. An increasingly impatient U.S. federal judge meanwhile says investors may start trying to seize government property as early as February. This will get very ugly for both sides unless they reach a solution soon, said Ruben Pasquali, an economist for Mayoral brokerage in Buenos Aires. Argentine officials have stared down furious bondholders from Tokyo to New York, and said that the offer on the table is not negotiable, arguing that the first priority for the government's money is to shore up a country that spiraled into poverty last year after its finances collapsed. It may not be a bluff. President Nestor Kirchner, who took office in May, is under political pressure at home to reach a deal that leaves Argentina's economy enough breathing room to build on this year's surprisingly brisk recovery. Argentines see themselves as the victims here, said James Neilson, an Argentine political analyst. Many people believe the default was splendid, that the debt was somehow imposed on us and now we're free. It's a bizarre cultural attitude. I think Kirchner will be much tougher than anybody believes during the (debt) restructuring, if only because he's popular and that's what most Argentines want him to do. He may be perfectly serious when he says he's not negotiating. Wall Street has been left asking itself how Argentina can promote a restructuring doomed to be rejected by investors. One interpretation is that they are not particularly worried about launching an exchange that will fail, said Abigail McKenna, a portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and a member of the steering committee of the Argentina Bondholders Committee. The other possibility is that the government feels it needs to stand tough on the terms until the last minute when a negotiation will ultimately take place. Argentina has said it wants to have the restructuring done by mid-2004. If it drags on longer, Argentine banks holding debt will still not know the worth of their assets, meaning credit will be scarce and the real economy will start to fade. Markets seem to think Argentina will eventually sweeten the deal, judging by the fact bond prices are at about 27 cents on the dollar. That is above the 25 cents implied in Argentina's current offer, even without factoring in past-due interest payments and the risk of another default. People seem to think this will eventually get worked out, Alberto Bernal, analyst for IDEAGlobal, Bernal said. But it will be interesting to see who makes the first move. Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service
FW: Nestor on Blackout in Argentina
Ian, This is also an expropriation, as it comes from the A-LIST. However, it is not shamless because I asked permission from one of the moderators, who happens to be myself. Sabri +++ On Jan/Feb 1999, a blackout left between 1 and 3,000,000 people (depending on the moment) without electric service across the Central-Western area of Greater Buenos Aires --FOR 15 DAYS! It was a particularly hot summer in usually very hot and wet Buenos Aires summers. Don´t have the dead count handy. But there were many. Sums paid for reparations were ridiculous. The privatized electrical companies of Argentina were, during those years, among the most profitable enterprises in the world. But they obtained these profits not only from unbelievably high prices (in dollars) but also from unconceivably anti-social savings. Of course, all the blame falls on the electrical companies after privatization. In order to reap more profits, they simply had reduced the levels of safety in the insulation within refurbished (imported, of course...) transformers, against the warnings of their own engineers and workers, many of who came from the State-owned SEGBA which had been serving the area wonderfully well for decades. Black outs, PCB-ridden neighborhoods, dangerous above the ground transformers that any car can crash into, plenty of accidents with dead people falling in open or wrongly closed pits in the distribution network, are some of the newly acquired boons that Argentineans have obtained from privatizations. It looks like many chickens are returning home to roost! Sorry for all cdes. and friends in the Northeastern USA - Eastern Canada area. In Buenos Aires, we know how it is like. Of course, there will always be some technical explanation about a stroke of lightning. Shit. You cannot save money on people´s everyday energy needs. A stroke of lightning cannot trigger such a disaster. It simply can´t, unless the network is underfit. Lic. Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky I N D E C
Re: What is to be done in Argentina
my feeling is that for a book to have a big impact, it has to fall on a fertile field. That is, the societal situation -- including the balance of class forces -- has to be such that people are looking for the kinds of ideas that the book presents. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Jurriaan Bendien [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 10:05 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] What is to be done in Argentina do you think that writing a book can have that big an effect? Whether or not a book has a big effect, depends I think on numerous factors, and a publisher would affirm this: - its content and form - who wrote it - the life and doings of the author - the specific context it is written in, or written for - who it is written for - how the book is marketed - whether it is bought in order to read it, or for some other reason or fashion (a book might have an effect which has nothing to do with its real content, or it might sell lots of copies without its content influencing anybody very much). I have commented on the anthropology of the uses of books as cultural artifacts already once before on Marxmail, referring to postmodernist culture. If you consider Marx's book Capital, it had very little readership in the 19th century, and if it did, this owed more to Marx's political engagements or reputation probably. It became a hit in, of all places, Russia. Pamphlets or short books by Kautsky, Lafargue, Engels, Mehring, Bebel, Jaures, Lenin etc. were far more popular, and there were literally hundreds in that genre. Rosa Luxemburg, Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel all remarked upon the fact, that even among selfstyled Marxists in the 1920s, Marx's magnum opus had mostly not been read beyond the first volume or extracts thereof (it wasn't exactly holiday reading of course), never mind digested and understood. Only after the founding of the Marx-Engels Institute and subsequently the transformation of Marxism into a state ideology, were large quantities of the book sold. To this day, communication theory remains a very much under-researched topic in Marxist circles. References: Ernest Mandel, The place of Marxism in history Paul Dukes, October and the World (According to the Guiness book of records, the bestselling book of all time is the Bible, the highest circulation magazine is the US Parade, and the honour of the highest circulation attained by a newspaper went to Komsomolskaya Pravda selling just under 22 million copies in 1990.)
Forwarded from Nestor Gorojovsky (Argentina update)
INTRODUCTION I owe the list a long posting on Argentinean politics. Rodríguez Saá, the Peronist candidate my own group supported critically during the campaign, seems to have been shattered by electoral defeat, and my silence may be understood as an indication that I have been shattered with my candidate. Well, news on my shattering are greatly exaggerated (and if we are to listen to the hardest core of the imperialist press, even those on Rodríguez Saá's, but this is something I can´t discuss here now). As a result of my not being shattered at all, however, I am extremely busy, and IMHO a good report in English on the Argentinean situation in the last couple of months needs more than some minutes snatched off my employer´s time. Today, I will give my views on Lou Pr.´s posting on what should be done in Argentina. But in order to answer, I will have to begin with some comments on the general political situation. Since no serious comment of it can fail being traced back to the April 27th election and the performance of Rodríguez Saá and his MNyP during the election and, particularly, AFTER it, in part at least, I am beginning to give my own account of what has happened here during these two eventful months. THE GENERAL SETTING OF THE CURRENT SITUATION: A BOTCHED POST-ELECTORAL SITUATION FOR THE LEFT OF THE NATIONAL CAMP During the Presidential campaign, and against the forebodings of many among his followers, Rodríguez Saá expected to arrive to a runoff with Menem and overwhelm him. There were times when he would even dream with a result on the first round that made the runoff unnecessary. He didn´t accept that there would exist a possibility not to be (at the very least) second after Menem, and April 27th, which left him out of the Great Game, took him completely unawares. He felt it had been a terrible defeat, a veredict by the Argentinean people that they do not want our program now, and decided that for the time being, this is Kirchner time. He made many other mistakes, all of which in the end turned what was no defeat at all but a grand beginning into an actual -post-electoral- defeat. The MNyP, in spite of many organizative and political shortcomings, in spite of the venomous attitude of the media, in spite of the relative desire for tranquility that had gained the spirit of the Argentinean masses once the worst exponents of neo-liberalism were ejected, managed to impose the agenda of the electoral debate, had been unable to beat the immense forces conjured up against it. But it had obtained a 15% of the vote for a hard, national-revolutionary set of immediate measures (not a general programme, but a hundred or so of concrete measures, sometimes even stating the date when they would be taken) in a very complex election where the strongly government-backed winner obtained 22%. It would moreover be added that Kirchner got to the Presidency thanks to Rodríguez Saá. Without him, Duhalde would have chosen another, more moderate, candidate. In order to fight off the man of the default (more on this latter on), he had to strike an agreement with the most progressive of the mainstream Peronist candidates, a candidate who would have never got to Presidency without the MNyP on the streets. Nothing of the above was enough, however, for Rodríguez Saá, and during the first two months after the elections he heaped mistake. That is why I stated above that he had not suffered was an _electoral_ defeat, but a _post-electoral_ (to a great deal self-inflicted) one. (Some day I hope I have the time to go on deeper on this issue, but today cannot do so: those who can read Spanish may have interesting insights through the debates collected on the Reconquista Popular archives). What really matters here is that the net result of Rodríguez Saá's self-injuring blunders was that no organized left-wing opposition to Kirchner has appeared _on the national camp_, and Kirchner´s first interesting signals won the attention of most of the anti-neoliberal voters in Argentina. This is the general setting of my reply to Lou´s observation on what is to be done. THE WHAT IS TO BE DONE ISSUE: CAN THE LEFT OF THE ANTI-NATIONAL CAMP FARE BETTER? Lou Proyect writes: The more I read about Argentina, the more it appears that the political crisis on the left stems from the failure of the Marxist groups to rid themselves of sectarian and dogmatic habits. The challenge to the Marxist left seems to come primarily from autonomist and libertarian socialist figures like Adamovsky who fetishize localized forms of resistance. If you stop and think about it, the autonomist left has the same kind of micropolitical orientation that the Russian economist current had in the early 1900s. All Argentina needs is a few latter-day Lenins who can write a What is to be Done updated for the current struggle. IMHO, this is partly accurate partly wrong. First, the _accurate_ side. The failure
Re: What is to be done in Argentina
All Argentina needs is a few latter-day Lenins who can write a What is to be Done updated for the current struggle. do you think that writing a book can have that big an effect? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: What is to be done in Argentina
Doug Henwood wrote: When I interviewed Naomi Klein, who spent most of the past year in Argentina, she said that there were so many sectarian Trot parties trying to tell the spontaneous mass assemblies what to do that they turned lots of people off from politics. Instead of following the vanguard into revolution, the masses went home. Yeah, but Naomi Klein has little to offer Argentina herself. In a Nation Magazine article, she criticizes sectarian Trotskyist formations but she also says that autonomism is a problem as well: Rather than challenge sectarian efforts at co-optation head-on, many of the assemblies and unemployed unions turned inward and declared themselves autonomous. While the parties' plans verged on scripture, some autonomists turned not having a plan into its own religion: So wary were they of co-optation any proposal to move from protest to policy was immediately suspect. full: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030526s=klein I think that Argentina does need a socialist revolution. It is too bad that this is not part of her vocabulary. In the final analysis, the global justice movement not only does not address the question of state power in a particular country, it is ideologically hostile to that sort of project. I would recommend the astute James Petras for a balance sheet on Argentina: While the unemployed workers movement initially proved promising in pressuring for jobs and funding for local projects, it soon confronted a series of serious problems. First the movement appealed to only a fraction of the unemployed workers less than 10% of the 4 million. Secondly while the MTDs were quite militant, their demands continued to focus on the 150 peso a month public works contracts there was little political depth or political-class consciousness beyond the leaders and their immediate followers. The assumption of many of the leftist-anarchist and Marxists was that the crises itself would radicalize the workers, or that the radical tactics of street blockages would automatically create a radical outlook. Particularly harmful in this regard were a small group of university students who propagated theories of spontaneous transformations based on not seeking political or state power but retaining local allegiances around small scale projects. Their guru, a British professor devoid of any experience with Argentine popular movements, provided an intellectual gloss to the practices of his local student followers. In practice, the deep structural problems persisted and the new Duhalde government soon initiated a major effort to pacify the rebellious townships of unemployed workers, providing over 2 million job contracts for 6 months, distributed by his loyal point men and women in the barrios. This move undercut the drawing power of the radical leaders of the MTD to extend their organizations and provided the Peronist party the organizational links to the poor and unemployed for future elections, particularly since the movement leaders rejected electoral politics and neglected any sort of political education. Over time most of the initial followers of the anarchist, spontaneist and no-power grouplets abandoned them for the Peronist-controlled unemployment committees. full: http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/030604petras.pdf -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: The Collapse of Argentina, part one
Santiago wrote: Dear Mr. Proyect, I came across your comment about a marxist explanation about my country's collapse and I found it really interesting. While studing for my degree in International Trade I had the luck to have professors of marxist thinking. Santiago, I hope you don't mind if I reply to you on the listserv I moderate, where my posts first appeared. I will leave off your last name in the interest of privacy. I think it will be hard to find a marxist explanation to this country's collapse because I think that the reasons that led this country to disaster had been little discussed in Marxism. As Marx stated, to reach socialism, a feudal society must become capitalist first. Well, not exactly. I would recommend Teodor Shanin's The Late Marx, which discusses Marx's correspondence with Russian populists and socialists who believed that a peasant based revolution could be a springboard for a continent-wide assault on capitalism. In fact, he disassociated himself from his more orthodox followers, including Plekhanov, who did believe that capitalism was a prerequisite for socialism. First of all I wouldn't say Argentina is a capitalist country. I think it is a country that has been trying to convert to capitalism without success for about 400 years. Socially Argentina can be divided in two parts: Buenos Aires and Inland Argentina. During the Spanish Empire, due to the leather trade (and smuggling) Buenos Aires was a city where the bourgeoisie, not the aristocracy, mattered. This fact was unique in the Spanish Empire. As we know, to reach development a country must change from a feudal society to a capitalist one. Spain, the metropolis took 200 years to complete that change, Buenos Aires was a trading, proto-capitalist society already in 1800. To illustrate this I will tell you that Buenos Aires in spite of being a very marginal part of the Empire, at the time of the Napoleonic Wars had the second merchant navy of the Empire. The Spanish monopoly and the feudal and low populated hinterland being major obstacles for its development. I imagine that I have a more rigorous definition of feudalism than you do. I regard this as a system based on the circulation of use-values organized around fiefdoms. Marc Bloch's studies of feudal society are a good place to understand how class relationships were organized there. By contrast, Spanish colonialism was organized around commodity production. Despite the prevalence of forced labor of one sort or another, goods such as cattle, wheat and cotton were produced for the world market. For an extended analysis of these questions, I recommend a look at articles I have written at: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics.htm under the heading Brenner thesis. Today things have not changed a lot, although the capitalist Argentina expanded towards northern Buenos Aires Province and southern Santa Fe and Cordoba, the rest of Argentina is still feudal. In a feudal society the population work for the lord, in a feudal Argentine province you will see that the governor is responsible for most of the jobs: It may be the most important landowner, he may be also the owner of the most important produce-processing industries and of course, he administrates the provincial governement that is the local main employer!. What about the other capitalists that should participate in the government? They donnot count: if they exist, their business activities depend on the existing governor activities so they will be part of the ruling party and will agree with any decission that makes the governor's business prosper. If there is any industrial investment it is surely foreign (i.e. from a Buenos Aires industrialist or a true foreign investor) and does not participates in the local politics. Isn't this feudalism? (Just see Carlos Menem, his province of origin (La Rioja) and the ruling party, Peronista). This fight between feudalism and capitalism has been the origin of the civil war in 1820-1860. Although feudalism won the war, it was Buenos Aires that effectively rule. Being a semi-capitalist country, Argentina found its way towards development until 1914. 1914 was the year when universal sufrage was put into practice and was the beginning of the retirement of the bourgeoisie from politics. Well, if you want to describe Argentine society as feudal, who am I to stand in the way. Let's agree to disagree on definitions. In any case, good luck with your studies. I know that graduate school can be a real bitch. I find a close relation between populism, neo-feudalism and imperialism. The foreign capital works with local caudillos who collaborate with them, creating a symbiotic association that obstrucs the upsurge of a local capitalist class which are economic competitors for the foreign capital and the political ones for the caudillo. But how did this all originated? My answer is Latifund, by creating such a dispair wealth distribution it obstacles democracy and capitalism
Re: What is to be done in Argentina
do you think that writing a book can have that big an effect? Whether or not a book has a big effect, depends I think on numerous factors, and a publisher would affirm this: - its content and form - who wrote it - the life and doings of the author - the specific context it is written in, or written for - who it is written for - how the book is marketed - whether it is bought in order to read it, or for some other reason or fashion (a book might have an effect which has nothing to do with its real content, or it might sell lots of copies without its content influencing anybody very much). I have commented on the anthropology of the uses of books as cultural artifacts already once before on Marxmail, referring to postmodernist culture. If you consider Marx's book Capital, it had very little readership in the 19th century, and if it did, this owed more to Marx's political engagements or reputation probably. It became a hit in, of all places, Russia. Pamphlets or short books by Kautsky, Lafargue, Engels, Mehring, Bebel, Jaures, Lenin etc. were far more popular, and there were literally hundreds in that genre. Rosa Luxemburg, Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel all remarked upon the fact, that even among selfstyled Marxists in the 1920s, Marx's magnum opus had mostly not been read beyond the first volume or extracts thereof (it wasn't exactly holiday reading of course), never mind digested and understood. Only after the founding of the Marx-Engels Institute and subsequently the transformation of Marxism into a state ideology, were large quantities of the book sold. To this day, communication theory remains a very much under-researched topic in Marxist circles. References: Ernest Mandel, The place of Marxism in history Paul Dukes, October and the World (According to the Guiness book of records, the bestselling book of all time is the Bible, the highest circulation magazine is the US Parade, and the honour of the highest circulation attained by a newspaper went to Komsomolskaya Pravda selling just under 22 million copies in 1990.)
Re: What is to be done in Argentina
Devine, James wrote: do you think that writing a book can have that big an effect? When I interviewed Naomi Klein, who spent most of the past year in Argentina, she said that there were so many sectarian Trot parties trying to tell the spontaneous mass assemblies what to do that they turned lots of people off from politics. Instead of following the vanguard into revolution, the masses went home. Doug
What is to be done in Argentina
This is a snippet from a dialog between Z Magazine publisher Michael Albert and Argentine radical Ezequiel Adamovsky at: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41ItemID=3995. The more I read about Argentina, the more it appears that the political crisis on the left stems from the failure of the Marxist groups to rid themselves of sectarian and dogmatic habits. The challenge to the Marxist left seems to come primarily from autonomist and libertarian socialist figures like Adamovsky who fetishize localized forms of resistance. If you stop and think about it, the autonomist left has the same kind of micropolitical orientation that the Russian economist current had in the early 1900s. All Argentina needs is a few latter-day Lenins who can write a What is to be Done updated for the current struggle. === Albert: You mentioned the existence of various Leninist, Trotskyism, and otherwise old style parties with members interacting amidst all the other undertakings. No doubt there have been serious frictions. Do you think widespread clarity about rejecting coordinatorism, often called market or centrally planned socialism, would have strengthened the more participatory and democratic parts of the movement as against the more centralized parts? Would the injunction that our projects should have structures embodying our values and consistent with attaining our aims have put pressure on the behavior and structures of these parties, do you think, thereby helping contrary approaches? Adamovsky: Without a doubt. In the experience of my Assembly, some people had an initial prejudice against left wing parties, some others had not. But in both cases, they would defend the autonomy and horizontality of the Assembly against left wing coordinatorism, as you call it. This was and still is a permanent issue in the meetings of most Assemblies --I've just read an email from the Assembly of another neighborhood, with the announcement that, after innumerable problems, the members of the Trotskyite Partido Obrero were asked to leave the Assembly and never come back! As members of the Assembly resisted left coordinatorism, we came across some texts and ideas that helped us gain awareness that non-hierarchical strategies were possible and that, actually, the left is pretty much divided about this issue all over the world. Undoubtedly, Parecon would have had a similar influence. It would help more people to become confident in our own non-hierarchical politics and in the principle that the way we struggle today must look the way we want the future to look. Means and ends cannot disagree. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: What is to be done in Argentina
If there were a simple formula for making revolution, they would be more frequent. Many of the great revolutions would have seemed to be relatively unlikely early on. Castro began with a bungled raid. Neither Lenin nor Mao had widespread support early in their revolutionary activities. My own sense of history is that things happen in very unexpected ways. I wish that I understood such things better, but if they were that understandable, people whom I would not like to have such understanding would be sharing it and making ugly things happen. I once asked Nestor about his situation in Argentina. Downward mobility seems a tragic understatement. Under such conditions, I suspect most people are worried about basic needs. A revolutionary movement would have to be able to touch their imagination and ignite their dwindling hopes. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
Re: What is to be done in Argentina
I would agree with that, but, pomo style, I cannot say in advance whether I would deny it or not. I left out of my remarks explicit references to bookreading as such. I think UNESCO publishes some statistics on it, but I think they refer to books sold mainly which tells you very little. My impression in Holland is that women read more published books than men, but that men write marginally more than women. A feminist companion of mine, who was a professional writer, said to me in 1990 that you should write a book if you are convinced that it needs to be written, that it ought to be written, and for no other reason. J. - Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 7:08 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] What is to be done in Argentina my feeling is that for a book to have a big impact, it has to fall on a fertile field. That is, the societal situation -- including the balance of class forces -- has to be such that people are looking for the kinds of ideas that the book presents. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Jurriaan Bendien [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 10:05 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] What is to be done in Argentina do you think that writing a book can have that big an effect? Whether or not a book has a big effect, depends I think on numerous factors, and a publisher would affirm this: - its content and form - who wrote it - the life and doings of the author - the specific context it is written in, or written for - who it is written for - how the book is marketed - whether it is bought in order to read it, or for some other reason or fashion (a book might have an effect which has nothing to do with its real content, or it might sell lots of copies without its content influencing anybody very much). I have commented on the anthropology of the uses of books as cultural artifacts already once before on Marxmail, referring to postmodernist culture. If you consider Marx's book Capital, it had very little readership in the 19th century, and if it did, this owed more to Marx's political engagements or reputation probably. It became a hit in, of all places, Russia. Pamphlets or short books by Kautsky, Lafargue, Engels, Mehring, Bebel, Jaures, Lenin etc. were far more popular, and there were literally hundreds in that genre. Rosa Luxemburg, Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel all remarked upon the fact, that even among selfstyled Marxists in the 1920s, Marx's magnum opus had mostly not been read beyond the first volume or extracts thereof (it wasn't exactly holiday reading of course), never mind digested and understood. Only after the founding of the Marx-Engels Institute and subsequently the transformation of Marxism into a state ideology, were large quantities of the book sold. To this day, communication theory remains a very much under-researched topic in Marxist circles. References: Ernest Mandel, The place of Marxism in history Paul Dukes, October and the World (According to the Guiness book of records, the bestselling book of all time is the Bible, the highest circulation magazine is the US Parade, and the honour of the highest circulation attained by a newspaper went to Komsomolskaya Pravda selling just under 22 million copies in 1990.)
Wall Street's role in Argentina collapse
Argentina Didn't Fall on Its Own Wall Street Pushed Debt Till the Last By Paul Blustein Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, August 3, 2003; Page A01 BUENOS AIRES -- Ah, the memories: Feasting on slabs of tender Argentine steak. Skiing at a resort overlooking a shimmering lake in the Andes. And late-night outings to a gentlemen's club in a posh Buenos Aires neighborhood. Such diversions awaited the investment bankers, brokers and money managers who flocked to Argentina in the late 1990s. In those days, Wall Street firms touted Argentina as one of the world's hottest economies as they raked in fat fees for marketing the country's stocks and bonds. Thus were sown the seeds of one of the most spectacular economic collapses in modern history, a debacle in which Wall Street played a major role. The fantasyland that Argentina represented for foreign financiers came to a catastrophic end early last year, when the government defaulted on most of its $141 billion debt and devalued the nation's currency. A wrenching recession left well over a fifth of the labor force jobless and threw millions into poverty. An extensive review of the conduct of financial market players in Argentina reveals Wall Street's complicity in those events. Investment bankers, analysts and bond traders served their own interests when they pumped up euphoria about the country's prospects, with disastrous results. Big securities firms reaped nearly $1 billion in fees from underwriting Argentine government bonds during the decade 1991-2001, and those firms' analysts were generally the ones producing the most bullish and influential reports on the country. Similar conflicts of interest involving analysts' research have come to light in other flameouts of the bubble era, such as Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. In Argentina's case, though, the injured party was not a group of stockholders or 401(k) owners, it was South America's second-largest country. Other factors besides optimistic analyses impelled foreigners to pour funds into Argentina with such reckless abandon as to make the eventual crash more likely and more devastating. One was Wall Street's system for rating the performance of mutual fund and pension fund managers, who were major buyers of Argentine bonds. Bizarrely, the system rewarded investing in emerging markets with the biggest debts -- and Argentina was often No. 1 on that list during the 1990s. Within the financial fraternity, some acknowledge that this behavior was a major contributor to the downfall of a country that prided itself on following free-market tenets. That is because the optimism emanating from Wall Street, combined with the heavy inflow of money, made the Argentine government comfortable issuing more and more bonds, driving its debt to levels that would ultimately prove ruinous. The time has come to do our mea culpa, Hans-Joerg Rudloff, chairman of the executive committee at Barclays Capital, said at a conference of bank and brokerage executives in London a few months ago. Argentina obviously stands as much as Enron in showing that things have been done and said by our industry which were realized at the time to be wrong, to be self-serving. full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15438-2003Aug2.html Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Argentina: struggling for the emergence of workers control
[NY Times] July 6, 2003 Workers in Argentina Take Charge of Abandoned Factories By LARRY ROHTER BUENOS AIRES, July 5 - The workers at the IMPA aluminum plant here all can remember when their company was privately owned, and a few veterans even recall when it was the property of the state. But these days, as the result of the worst economic crisis in the country's history, it is the workers themselves who are the factory's stockholders and managers. When the economy collapsed here 18 months ago, the situation was so bad that the owners of many factories simply shut their doors and walked away, in most cases owing their employees months and months of back pay. Rather than accept that situation, workers - backed by neighborhood associations and left-wing groups enamored with the idea of people's capitalism - have sometimes been able to persuade bankruptcy courts to let them take over the company's assets. The only boss here now is the customer, said Plácido Peñarieta, one of nine employees at the Chilavert Artes Gráficas cooperative, which prints art books and posters, calendars and concert programs. We've learned to depend on ourselves and nobody else. Across this nation of 37 million people, at least 160 factories employing an estimated 10,000 people are now being run as cooperatives by their employees, ranging from a tractor factory in Córdoba to a tile and ceramics plant in Patagonia. But the largest concentration is here in the capital and its suburbs, where the nucleus of the country's industrial production is located. With 172 workers making aluminum cans, foil and wrappers, IMPA is the largest of the so-called retrieved factories here. Production is still far from the peaks of the 1990's, but since workers took over with an initial 50 employees under contract, production has tripled, to 50 tons a month. We could easily be turning out 90 tons a month, because we've got the orders but not the working capital, said Guillermo Robledo, chosen by the workers to be the plant manager. Instead, he added, we're in the ironic position of having to extend 60-day credit lines to our customers, some of whom are large multinationals with much easier access to capital than a workers' cooperative. Like most of the cooperatives, this factory is run by an administrative council, whose members are elected by the workers. Monthly assemblies are held to discuss issues like salaries - which have nearly doubled since the low point as the economy collapsed - how many new workers to hire and who they should be. The IMPA workers have even voted to turn space that was not being used into a neighborhood cultural and arts center. The positive response to the cultural activities, said Eduardo Murúa, a leader of the cooperative, provides an umbrella that prevents the banks from acting against us and has gained the factory favorable publicity and financial support from the city government. Faced with the loss of jobs and tax revenues, the municipality has sought to help by taking legal title to abandoned or derelict factories and the machinery inside. Under new legislation, it rents the premises to the workers' cooperatives and supports them in their efforts to negotiate with creditors. Our responsibility as elected representatives is clear, said Delia Bisutti, president of the City Council's economic development commission and the main sponsor of the law. Given a choice between bankruptcies, many of which are fraudulent and intended simply to loot assets, and maintaining some job postings, we have moved to reduce the social costs of this awful crisis. But with the Argentine economy - especially companies that export goods - finally showing some signs of recovery, the original owners of some plants have resurfaced. That has led to legal struggles with workers and, in one recent case, even violence. In April, the police sought unsuccessfully to enforce a court order and evict workers from the Brukman textile factory, a producer of men's suits, jackets and pants. The 56 employees who have been running the plant since the end of 2001, though owed wages, had not followed the procedures established by the city ordinance to gain control. That provided a legal basis for owners' complaints that they are merely trespassers and thieves. At factories where ownership is not in dispute, the employee-managers confront other problems. Initially, workers say, some longstanding suppliers and clients were reluctant to do business with them, and even now, bank loans and supplier credits are nearly impossible to obtain. It was difficult to get started because even though the company had a reputation, people did not believe that we workers were capable of managing things, said Jorge Luján Gutiérrez, an employee of the Chilavert print shop. We had to show that the high level of quality was still intact and that the only thing missing was a few executives in the front office. Workers
Argentina
IMF Chief Meets with Troubled Argentina Reuters Monday, June 23, 2003; 11:05 PM By Hugh Bronstein BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - The head of the International Monetary Fund began talks with Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner Monday, as the country's new government made a fresh start at pulling the economy out of its debt crisis. IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler also met Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna, as well as bankers and businessmen. The two-day meetings come 18 months after Argentina staged the world's biggest debt default and were seen by Wall Street as a preliminary step in the country's financial rehabilitation. We would hope that the IMF encourages Argentina to move quickly on the debt restructuring and presses upon the Argentine authorities the need to make more of a fiscal effort, said Abigail McKenna, a portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and member of the steering panel of the Argentina Bondholders Committee. As the meetings took place, several hundred protesters from left-wing groups gathered in downtown Buenos Aires to protest Koehler's presence. Some demonstrators burned a U.S. flag. Officials in the government, the IMF and the United States -- the top IMF shareholder -- have said the country would benefit from a long-term lending deal to replace an intermediate accord set to expire in August. But the Kirchner government is keen to protect its citizens from IMF-style austerity after a four-year recession pushed millions of middle class workers into poverty and joblessness. Lavagna, under a previous government last year, engaged in a war of words with the IMF over his softly-go-softly approach to austerity programs. In a possible sign of progress, the government said on Monday it would give state help to thousands of poor Argentines unable to make mortgage payments. That may allow the government to end an emergency measure that prevents banks from foreclosing on mortgages -- a measure that irked the IMF. With bond restructuring talks yet to start and the economy just beginning to grow, expectations were muted as Koehler made the rounds in Buenos Aires. Market players did not expect a new IMF program for Argentina to be announced this week. Koehler was expected to speak publicly about his trip late Tuesday afternoon after meeting with legislators, provincial governors and Central Bank chief Alfonso Prat Gay. Considered a star pupil of free-market policies in the 1990s, Argentina fell from grace with the IMF and United States after mismanagement led to economic collapse at the end of 2001 when the country defaulted on $95 billion in debt. The IMF drew heavy fire for its role in the crisis -- with many Argentines saying their country made a major mistake by following the lender's advice -- and for its failure to bail out the country. But six months ago, the two sides managed to strike a $6.8-billion debt rollover deal, which expires in August. Latin America's No. 3 economy is one of the largest debtors to multilateral lenders. Argentina owes $14 billion to the IMF and $31 billion to multilaterals as a whole.
The Good Life Is No More for Argentina
LA Times, Feb. 18, 2003 The Good Life Is No More for Argentina The nation rode high on a free-market system, backed by the IMF and tied to the dollar. Then the global economy spun it into disaster. By Héctor Tobar, Times Staff Writer SAN ISIDRO, Argentina -- More than any other developing nation in the 1990s, Argentina embraced the free market and the global economy. For top officials at the International Monetary Fund and economic gurus of the American right, Argentina was a star pupil. It sold off most government enterprises and loosened banking restrictions and controls on foreign investment. The IMF backed the strategy with billions of dollars in loans. For a few years, people lived better than ever. Many Argentines believed that their country, already the most prosperous in Latin America, was finally graduating into the First World. Then, in December 2001, the bottom fell out, causing a run on the banks that wiped out billions of dollars in deposits. Nearly six months later, on a May morning that happened to be her 59th birthday, Norma Albino stepped into her bank branch in this Buenos Aires suburb of cobblestone streets, famous for its affluence and the tall spires of its 100-year-old church. She asked for the third or fourth time since December for her family's money. When the teller told her that he couldn't help her, she blurted out: I'm going to kill myself. As horrified bank employees looked on, she poured a bottle of rubbing alcohol over her head and snapped at a cigarette lighter. Albino became, at that instant, a symbol of the rage and hurt smoldering inside millions of Argentines. Rushed to a hospital, she survived with third-degree burns. Months later, she has found that the best therapy is simply to forget. The politicians robbed us, she said. But I don't care anymore. I try not to think about it. Argentina's official unemployment rate stands at 22%, about the same as in the United States during the Great Depression. Poverty afflicts 53% of Argentines, triple the rate of just five years ago. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Argentina
Title: Argentina http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fg-argecon18feb18001440,1,1676421.story The Good Life Is No More for Argentina The nation rode high on a free-market system, backed by the IMF and tied to the dollar. Then the global economy spun it into disaster. By Hector Tobar Times Staff Writer February 18, 2003/L.A. TIMES SAN ISIDRO, Argentina -- More than any other developing nation in the 1990s, Argentina embraced the free market and the global economy. For top officials at the International Monetary Fund and economic gurus of the American right, Argentina was a star pupil. It sold off most government enterprises and loosened banking restrictions and controls on foreign investment. The IMF backed the strategy with billions of dollars in loans. For a few years, people lived better than ever. Many Argentines believed that their country, already the most prosperous in Latin America, was finally graduating into the First World. Then, in December 2001, the bottom fell out, causing a run on the banks that wiped out billions of dollars in deposits. Nearly six months later, on a May morning that happened to be her 59th birthday, Norma Albino stepped into her bank branch in this Buenos Aires suburb of cobblestone streets, famous for its affluence and the tall spires of its 100-year-old church. She asked -- for the third or fourth time since December -- for her family's money. When the teller told her that he couldn't help her, she blurted out: I'm going to kill myself. As horrified bank employees looked on, she poured a bottle of rubbing alcohol over her head and snapped at a cigarette lighter. Albino became, at that instant, a symbol of the rage and hurt smoldering inside millions of Argentines. Rushed to a hospital, she survived with third-degree burns. Months later, she has found that the best therapy is simply to forget. The politicians robbed us, she said. But I don't care anymore. I try not to think about it. Argentina's official unemployment rate stands at 22%, about the same as in the United States during the Great Depression. Poverty afflicts 53% of Argentines, triple the rate of just five years ago. We're not the poorest country. There are places that are much worse off, said Raul Queimalinos, an unemployed economist and writer. What's hard for us is that we've known something better. We've lived well. How Argentina came to suffer such a fall is an emblematic tale of the global economy's power to spur sudden prosperity in developing countries, and then, even more swiftly, to bring disaster. It is never easy to apply the formulas of free markets to struggling countries, each with its own mix of politics and economic vulnerabilities. Some of the best candidates fail. In Argentina, corruption, political wrangling and a baroque system of public spending meant that reforms demanded by the IMF were never fully implemented. Over the course of a boom-and-bust decade, about $17 billion in IMF loans went largely to waste. Several economists -- including Nobel Memorial Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz -- believe that the IMF based its policies on unrealistic expectations of Argentina's ability to reform and that it knew trouble was coming. Still, for a decade, the IMF endorsed Argentina's economic policies, giving a seal of approval that built confidence in its institutions. [[etc.]] Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
IMF technical assistance advisor nabbed in Argentina
IMF man facing graft charge bailed in Argentina Reuters, 02.15.03, 5:45 PM ET BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Reuters) - An International Monetary Fund employee, arrested on corruption charges linked to his stint as Peru's economy chief under disgraced ex-President Alberto Fujimori, was freed on bail Saturday pending checks on whether he will face extradition, a court official said. Jorge Baca Campodonico, Peru's economy minister from June 1998 to January 1999, was arrested Thursday by Interpol on charges police say are linked to Peru's ex-spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, in a case of misdirected public funds. The IMF Friday voiced concern at the detention of its technical assistance adviser, who came to Buenos Aires as part of a mission to review crisis-ravaged Argentina's fiscal accounts, and arranged legal representation for him. He cannot leave the country, the court official said, adding Baca Campodonico had paid around $10,000 bail. The Federal Judge overseeing the case was trying to ascertain whether he had diplomatic immunity. Baca Campodonico is accused by Peruvian authorities of illegally enriching himself and violating the public's trust. An Argentine federal police spokeswoman said after his arrest that he was linked to the corruption network of Vladimiro Montesinos. Federal Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral said Friday Baca Campodonico had a U.N. passport, but added that did not necessarily mean he had diplomatic immunity. IMF officials benefit from such immunity depending on their rank and the jobs they were carrying out, he added. The Argentine government, which has only just managed to clinch a deal to delay having to pay nearly $7 billion in debt it owes the fund in coming months after a year of tortuous negotiations, has sought to distance itself from the arrest. Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service Tom Walker 604 255 4812
From Argentina, looking for Ambulance-Homicide Theory
Dear members of Pen-L, My name is Marcela Perelman, I live and work in Buenos Aires. I work at Center for Social and Legal Studies (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales/ CELS), an NGO with a large tradition in the fight for human rights since last dictatorship. I work for a program named Institutional Violence and Public Safety. I have read about Anthony Harri's work on the Ambulance-Homicide Theory, published by NYTimes last december 15th, I think (I haven´t seen the article, though). We are looking for information related to that theory. Please, if anyone has the article or could tell me about it or think that other material might be of my interest, I will greatly appreciate it. Kind regards from the Southest South, Marcela
Argentina
washingtonpost.com IMF Readying 'Transitional' Loan to Head Off Argentine Default By Paul Blustein Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, January 14, 2003; Page A07 More than a year after cutting off its lending to Argentina, the International Monetary Fund is poised to grant a transitional loan to the country, a move that is generating intense controversy because part of the motivation is to stave off a threatened default by Buenos Aires on its obligations to the IMF and other official institutions. The loan could be approved by the IMF's executive board as early as Friday, when Argentina is due to make a payment of about $1 billion to the fund, although it might have to wait until next week, officials in Washington and Buenos Aires said yesterday. Argentine officials have been warning that in the absence of an IMF deal they would refuse to make either the IMF payment or another $1 billion owed this week to the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. But one high-ranking official said the country will pay if we think there is enough evidence that the IMF agreement is certain to be finalized. Terms of the loan, under which Argentina would get only enough to repay about $3 billion it owes to the IMF between now and August, are still being negotiated by IMF and Argentine officials. But the loan is drawing criticism from private economists who worry that it may set a poor precedent by showing that a default threat can force the fund to lend to a country that hasn't spelled out a coherent plan for restoring growth and stability. Some IMF staff members share those concerns. According to sources familiar with the situation, the loan is going forward at the insistence of several powerful member countries of the IMF, notably the United States, at least in part because of a desire to avoid the repercussions of a big borrower's default to the multilateral lending institutions. Both sides realize they have a lot to lose by failing to strike a deal, said Kristin Forbes, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former official in the Bush administration's Treasury Department. But at the same time, to just give more money, even if there's a low chance that Argentina will do what is needed to recover, is hard to justify. The idea behind the loan is to tide over Argentina's crisis-stricken economy until after a presidential election April 27. That makes sense for the IMF politically, said Christian Stracke, head of emerging-markets research at CreditSights, an independent credit research firm, because it may help defuse mounting sentiment within the country to sever ties completely with the fund and the international financial system. But economically, while Buenos Aires has made progress in getting its budget and inflation under control, if you look at most of the reasons why the IMF has resisted entering into an agreement over the past year, most of those reasons still stand, Stracke said, citing as an example the lack of a long-term plan to restructure the ailing banking system. The IMF and its political masters just don't want Argentina to default, he said. Argentine officials hotly disputed those assessments. The agreement is going to be far more ambitious than many people envisage, Guillermo Nielsen, Argentina's finance secretary, said yesterday in a telephone interview. He added that the country has a clear strategy for tackling its major problems, including those of the banking system, as witnessed by the fact that depositors have been returning funds to the banks after fleeing in 2001. An IMF spokesman said he could confirm that the talks are continuing but have not been concluded. Tony Fratto, a Treasury Department spokesman, said that we continue to encourage the fund and Argentina to arrive at a short-term, transitional program, which would allow for some breathing room for Argentina to continue making the reforms necessary for them to move forward. Already stagnating amid a long recession, Argentina's economy was sent reeling early last year when the government, facing a financial panic, abandoned the peg linking the peso to the U.S. dollar. It defaulted on nearly $100 billion in debts owed mostly to commercial banks and private bondholders. The country's credit standing worsened even further in November when it defaulted on all but a fraction of an $805 million payment due to the World Bank; countries that default to the official institutions -- a list that mostly includes failed states such as Somalia -- risk becoming full-fledged international pariahs. Securing an IMF loan could be Argentina's first step toward reversing the deterioration in its creditworthiness, a step the government badly wants to take because many of its exporters cannot get financing to ship their goods abroad. Nielsen disclosed that this week, the government will take another step toward restoring its foreign credit by naming a short list of firms that may be selected as the government's
Greg Palast, Venezuela and Argentina: A Tale of Two Coups
Venezuela and Argentina: A Tale of Two Coups New Internationalist Magazine Sunday, July 7, 2002 by Greg Palast The big business-led coup in Venezuela failed, where international finance's coup in Argentina has succeeded. Greg Palast gives us the inside track on two very different power-grabs. http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=169row=1 -- Yoshie * Calendar of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html * Anti-War Activist Resources: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/
Argentina
Child hunger deaths shock Argentina Economic crisis sharpens poverty in world's fourth biggest food exporting country Hannah Baldock in Tucuman, Argentina Monday November 25, 2002 The Guardian Children are dying daily of malnutrition in Argentina as a result of the catastrophic economic crisis in the world's fourth biggest exporter of food. In the past week, images of stunted, emaciated children have scandalised Argentina, long known as the grainstore of the world. Meanwhile the vast, fertile country has increased exports of meat, wheat, corn and soya this year. Some of the children pictured in north-eastern Tucuman province had the bloated stomachs, blotchy skin and dry hair associated with severe protein deficiency. The national charity Red Solidaria said that 60 children a month were being taken to hospital with severe malnutrition, and 400 were being treated as outpatients. The Centre for Child Nutrition Studies, which advises the World Health Organisation, has said 20% of children in Argentina are suffering from malnutrition. Dr Oscar Hillal, the deputy director of the children's hospital in Tucuman, said: This is not Africa, this is Argentina, where there are 50 million cattle and 39 million people - but where we have a government which is totally out of touch with the people's needs. In an astonishing admission, the production minister, Anibal Fernandez, last week attributed the child deaths to a sick society and a ruling class that are sons of bitches, all of them, myself included. If not, this would not be happening, he said. It is a chronic and cumulative problem. It has been going on for many years and everyone has been turning a blind eye. However, Chiche Duhalde, who is responsible for social programmes and is also married to the president, shifted the blame on to the provincial government for mismanaging social emergency programs. We are not Biafra, she said, pledging to oversee an official search for medical emergencies in the poorest provinces. Five non-governmental organisations from Tucuman province last week filed a legal suit against Tucuman's governor Julio Miranda for wilful neglect of the children who have died of malnutrition in his province, where 64% of people live in extreme poverty. They accused him of diverting national funding for social programmes into clientelism and corruption. The organisations were supported by the archbishop of Tucuman, Hector Villalba, who warned in a public address more than four months ago: Many children are dying in the face of the inaction of the authorities, when the human and technical means exist to avoid it. Mr Miranda himself attended the meeting. However, Tucuman is not the only province affected. It emerged this week that 49 children have died in Misiones province this year, 23 in Santa Fe and more in the poor northern provinces. Some 450,000 jobs have been lost in Argentina since October last year, leaving one in every five people unemployed, one in two living in poverty, and one in four destitute. Salaries have lost 70% of their value and the economy is shrinking at a rate of 14%, while inflation is running at 40%. In Tucuman, parents admitted to feeding their babies and infants with sugary green tea instead of milk or food, which they often cannot afford. Four of the children who died there last week, aged between two and six, weighed under 10kg. Four or five pesos (£1) is the most that many people in the shanty towns can scrape together from a day's labour. I hardly had any breast milk said 24-year-old Roxana de Benedetti, whose five-year-old son Hector died three weeks ago in Villa La Carmela, a shanty town outside Tucuman, and whose six-month-old daughter Milagros, who weighs only 2.8kg (just over 6lb), is in the children's hospital in Tucuman. They told me I needed fortified milk powder, but it costs 10 pesos a box. Thank God they'll give it to her in there. The government has defaulted on an $805m (£500m) debt with the World Bank, which will cut it off from $1.8bn extra aid earmarked for poverty relief and social programmes. It seems certain that any new deal with the IMF on debt repayments will be conditional on severe belt-tightening by the provinces - meaning no new social spending.
Argentina defaults on loan repayment
Are there any Argentines here who can comment on this? Sabri ++ Financial Times Argentina defaults on loan repayment By Alan Beattie in Washington November 15 2002 0:29 The Argentine government on Thursday took the extraordinary step of defaulting on a loan repayment to the World Bank, in a sign of its intense frustration over negotiations with the bank's sister institution, the International Monetary Fund. The decision not to make a due payment of $805m places Argentina in the company of countries such as Iraq, Zimbabwe and Liberia in defaulting on loans from international institutions. It makes Argentina ineligible for any new lending from the bank or reductions in interest rates on outstanding loans. Disbursements from existing loans, around $2bn of which has yet to be paid, will also be stopped if the country does not pay within 30 days. Alfredo Atanasof, chief of the cabinet, said: The country's level of reserves prevents it from paying the total of the quotas that expire today. An interest payment of $79m would be made, he said. The World Bank confirmed it had received a partial payment. The World Bank welcomes statements from government officials that Argentina remains committed to rectifying the situation as soon as possible. Economists said the decision showed Argentina's determination to raise the stakes in negotiations with the IMF. The government wants to have its $13bn debt to the fund rolled over until the end of next year. The IMF said on Thursday that it would allow Argentina to defer its next loan repayment, due on November 22.
IMF plays down Argentina debt default
Financial Times IMF plays down Argentina debt default By Peter Hudson in Buenos Aires and Caroline Daniel in Washington November 16 2002 The International Monetary Fund on Friday played down the significance of Argentina's default on debt repayments to the World Bank, its sister institution. A statement by Anne Krueger, the fund's first deputy managing director, declared: We expect discussions will continue in the coming days. It added that the fund's management would recommend to the executive board an extension on a loan payment due on November 22. We are not shocked, a fund spokesperson said. We were not operating under any deadline and we never tried to set the stage for this week being a big decision. Argentina paid only $79.2m against a scheduled repayment of $805m. Although that means it is no longer eligible for fresh loans or reduced interest rates on current debt, the bank will continue to disburse funds for 30 days under existing agreements. Argentina remains optimistic that it can reach a deal with the fund. Our impression is that we moved forward a great deal on technical issues, a senior government official said. The Argentine Congress was in danger of undermining that progress, however, with attempts to pass laws protecting bank debtors from foreclosure and allowing them to use government bonds to pay their debts. President Eduardo Duhalde took the decision to postpone payment to the World Bank in order to force politicians to back the accord, the official said. Paul O'Neill, the US Treasury secretary, expressed hope for a deal. Our position continues to be supportive of the IMF and the Argentinians reaching an agreement that will provide for sustainable economic growth in Argentina, and as quickly as possible, putting that country back into a position where its people have an opportunity to grow and be employed again. Article at: http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/ FullStoryc=StoryFTcid=1035873342016p=1012571727088
An NLR article on Argentina
The latest NLR has an article (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25104.shtml) by a liberal professor named David Rock on the economic crisis in Argentina that covers the same terrain as the series of articles I posted here some months back (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/state_and_revolution.htm). Although it contains some very useful information, it betrays a certain waffling on the decisive question of imperialism. This does not surprise me completely, since Nestor warned me about David Rock when I began my research. Although Rock's book on Argentina (Argentina, 1516-1987: from Spanish colonization to Alfonsin) appears authoritative and can be found in all your better bookstores, you would be advised to take it with a grain of salt. In the NLR article, the word imperialism does not occur once. Although this in itself is not proof of anything, the fact that Rock can write Only the Baring Crisis of 1890 disrupted the development of the export economy is utter nonsense. As I pointed out in copious detail, Great Britain's imperial control was manifested through the railway system which Rock does not even mention. When it comes to Peronism, Rock describes it as near-totalitarian, which should come as a complete surprise to anybody who is familiar with the period. If anything, the Peron era represented a democratic advance in social terms, in the same fashion as Chavez's presidency in Venezuela. I suppose that as the author of Authoritarian Argentina: the Nationalist Movement, its History and its Impact, Rock would be ill-disposed to any attempt by a Latin American country to determine its own destiny. If they aren't careful, they could easily end up slipping into fascism. In the concluding section of the article, Rock manages to avoid any mention of the grass-roots mobilizations that are transforming the country. Instead, he seems intent on offering advice to the dissident Radical congresswoman Elisa Carrió who has emerged as a leftish alternative, having gained a reputation as a scourge of corruption. It is somewhat sad that NLR has such limited horizons when it comes to changing Argentine society. I guess they want to be careful not to betray any unfashionable ideas about proletarian revolution. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Argentina: Hebe at Zanon Factory
Forwarded from the PGA list. Sabri +++ The following are excerpts from the speach Hebe de Bonifini, leaders of the organization Mothers of Plaza de Mayo gave on October 24,2002: Companeros, you no doubt know that last week I was at the Zanon factory. I went in representation of the Mothers, of our University, and the Plaza itself which the Mothers represent. It was an incredible dayA year and a half ago the companeros took over the factory. They were for some time outside, in tents, and had nothing to eat. But thanks to a group of men and women that is called Sainuco who work in the jail, the ordinary prisoners gave up half of their food. The strikers had nothing to eat and did not want to give up their tents where they were. I was surprised when I entered the factory because it is a factory of 74 thousand cubic meters, more than four blocks long. It is now working at least 20% of capacity creating new ceramics. These have to be watched over because the trade union bureacrats want to take it away to give to the government so that the government sells it for nothing to the Chileans, and then the government will say its just losing money. Nevertheless, with 20% functioning, it is making a profit. This shows the bosses really just want to throw the workers in the street. There are more than 200 companeros working and they have given work to 10 more unemployed workers. Everybody earns the same: 800 pesos (about $230 dollars) But the unemplyed said we prefer to earn 400 peosos apice and then we can create 10 more jobs. Now there is 20 unemployed earning 400 pesos each. They eat there. They have a spectacular dining room, clean, a well kept, irrigated garden. We are seeing a demonstration of a new form of governing, a new form of showing we don't need the bosses, that we don't need the powerful, that we are capable of many more things if we believe we can do them We believe a solidarity commission is very important with these companeros, but it shouldn't be tied to the political parties: we have to be the most independent possible: The parties can come but they cannot take over On another issue, the students have taken over the Rectory of the University. They have 5 points which they are not going to negotiate. They want to impose a negotiating commission on them, but the kids do not want it. The Mothers are marching at 8PM to the demonstration... There are a lot of things happening: the Peoples Assemblies, the piquetero unemployed movement We tried to get into the Court today, but they didn't want to let us in. I pushed a policeman against the wall and all the Mothers got inThe police and everybody there couldn't believe that we had such strength to get in Finally they let me into courtroom. But they told me I had to take off the handkerchief that I have worn for 25 years. Then a judge and a prosecutro told me that no one can go into a courtroom wearing a political symbol. I told him to stick it up his ass...The handkerchief identifies us, that handkerchief stregthens us, it shows our struggle of 25 years still bothers the powerful. If it bothers the judges, and bothers the prosecutors, and bothers the politicians and the cops, it bothers them all. It it bothers them, it serves a function. (translated by Earl Gilman)
Argentina: Alternative Media Social Movements (Oct. 17) OtherUpcoming Events
Thursday, October 17 Argentina: Alternative Media and Social Movements / Argentina: Medios Alternativos y Movimientos Sociales Lecture by Marie Trigona, with Videos Slides / Conferencia por Marie Trigona, con proyeccion de videos y diapositivas Marie Trigona, an independent journalist and alternative media maker, will present two videos by independent media collectives in Argentina: La Bisagra de la Historia [At the Hinge of History] by venteveovideo, a member org of Argentina Arde; and Las Madres en la Rebelión Popular del 19 y 20 de Diciembre de 2001 [The Mothers in the Popular Rebellion of 19-20 December 2001] by Grupo de Cine Insurgente. The videos document firsthand accounts from the streets during the popular rebellion of December 19 and 20, 2002. Trigona recently spent three weeks in Argentina investigating current events and networking with alternative media groups. She will discuss the current Argentine economic crisis and comment on the waves of social movements growing in Argentina, focusing on alternative media, the piqueteros (unemployed workers' movement), popular assemblies, reoccupied factories, police repression, and popular protest. Trigona's work, covering the Zapatista Caravan and the Plan Puebla Panama, has been published in Z Magazine: http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/may01trigona.htm http://www.zmag.org/Zmag/articles/february02trigona.htm. Time: 7:30 - 9:30 PM Location: 300 Journalism Building, Ohio State University, 242 West 18th Ave., Columbus, OH Campus Map: http://www.osu.edu/map/linkbuildings/journalismbuilding.html Sponsors: Student International Forum Social Welfare Action Alliance Contact: Yoshie Furuhashi, 614-668-6554 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Saturday, October 19, 9:30 AM - 1:00 PM Citizens' Grassroots Congress Harvey Wasserman, the internationally known environmentalist will speak about the proposed plan to dump 77,000 tons of radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain. If Yucca Mountain opens in 2010, as scheduled, all that waste must travel American highways or railroads to get there -- some 100,000 shipments over three decades through thousands of American communities. The potential for a serious accident or terrorist hijacking has opponents to the transport plan calling it Mobile Chernobyl. Find out if nuclear waste will be transported through your neighborhood and what you can do about it. Location: Eastminster Presbyterian Church, 3100 East Broad St. (On the COTA bus line). More information: Rick Wilhelm [EMAIL PROTECTED] or Connie Hammond [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Sunday, October 20 War Without End? Not In Our Name! Demonstrate against Bush's Endless War! Time: 5-6 PM Location: 15th Ave. and High St., Columbus, OH Contact: 614-252-9255 Thursday, October 24 Palestine Truth Tour 2002 Featuring: * New Video From Palestine by Big Noise Films (the producer of Showdown in Seattle, Black and Gold, Zapatista, 9.11) featuring Mustafa Barghouthi, Hanan Ashrawi, and recent footage from Jenin, Hebron, and more. * Reports from International Solidarity Movement activists who recently returned from Freedom Summer in Palestine, and activists from Palestine solidarity and other movements. Time: 7:30 - 9:30 PM Location: 300 Journalism Building, Ohio State University, 242 West 18th Ave., Columbus, OH Campus Map: http://www.osu.edu/map/linkbuildings/journalismbuilding.html Sponsors: Student International Forum Social Welfare Action Alliance Contact: Yoshie Furuhashi, 614-668-6554 or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Saturday, October 26 NATIONAL MARCH on WASHINGTON DC to STOP the WAR ON IRAQ. For details, see http://www.InternationalANSWER.org. For info about transportation from Columbus to D.C., call the Community Organizing Center at 614-252-9255. Sunday, October 27 War Without End? Not In Our Name! Demonstrate against Bush's Endless War! Time: 5-6 PM Location: 15th Ave. and High St., Columbus, OH Contact: 614-252-9255 Thursday, October 31 Screening: _The Gaza Strip_ (Dir. James Longley, 2001) * Like most news reports and television images coming out of the Middle East these days, _Gaza Strip_, an unsparing new documentary by James Longley, offers little reason for optimism. The film, which opens today at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, was shot in the winter and spring of 2001, and it provides a grim, upsetting glimpse at the lives of some of the 1.2 million Palestinians who live in the crowded cities and refugee camps of Gaza. Mr. Longley makes powerful use of the techniques of cinéma vérité. The absence of voice-over narration and talking-head interviews gives his portrait of daily life under duress a riveting immediacy. Much of _Gaza Strip_ follows Mohammed Hejazi, a 13-year-old newspaper vendor. This youth, who left school after the second grade, spends much of his spare time with other boys throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, even though his best friend was killed by the gunfire that is the inevitable response
Argentina
For what its worth, here is a recent Stratfor analysis. Sabri + Argentina: Duhalde May Have More To Gain in Default 24 September 2002 Summary The chance that the International Monetary Fund will sign an aid agreement with Argentina's government appears slim at best. Senior fund officials believe the government lacks the support needed to guarantee compliance with any possible conditions, while the absence of an agreement increases the pressure for President Eduardo Duhalde to default on about $6.7 billion in debt owed to multilateral entities. Analysis The executive director of the International Monetary Fund, Horst Kohler, urged Argentina's society and political classes Sept. 23 to set aside their differences and give President Eduardo Duhalde the support he needs to negotiate a binding financial aid agreement with the fund. The remarks underscored the fact that nine months after defaulting on $95 billion in international bonds, Argentina is no closer to an agreement with the IMF today than it was in December 2001, when the peso was devalued and the country stopped paying its debts to private international lenders. The IMF has not offered Duhalde's government a firm aid agreement because senior fund officials have said they believe that any deal signed now would fall apart in three months or less. Moreover, the fund's concerns about the sustainability of an aid agreement with Duhalde's government appear justified. As time passes without any progress in negotiations, Argentina's financial bind is growing much worse. During the fourth quarter of 2002, Argentina's government must repay $2.4 billion it owes to the IMF, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. This is nearly a quarter of its current international reserves of $9.4 billion. Another $4.5 billion owed to these multilateral entities comes due in the first quarter of 2003. So far in 2002 the IMF has granted Argentina one-year delays on the repayment of $4.6 billion it owes the fund. However, nearly all of the $2.2 billion due to lenders in the final three months of this year is owed to the World Bank and IADB, and payment cannot be pushed back under the existing loan agreements with both entities. This means that Duhalde's government confronts a grim choice. If Argentina pays its debts to the IMF, the World Bank and IADB, it will remain in their good graces. This would facilitate the granting of new loans from these multilateral entities, eventually helping to launch debt-restructuring talks with private international creditors who hold the $95 billion in defaulted government bonds. However, draining Argentina's international reserves likely would weaken the peso and accelerate inflation even more. This could further aggravate social hardship in a country where unemployment now tops 25 percent, more than 50 percent of the populace is poor and the economy contracted more than 14 percent during the first half of 2002. As a result, last week senior Argentine officials hinted publicly that Duhalde's government might default on the country's debt obligations to lenders such as the IMF in order to protect its international reserves and currency. The statements prompted the IMF's second-ranking official, Anne Krueger, to warn that the international financial community would punish the country if it defaults on its multilateral debts. This week Argentine officials softened their position. Cabinet Chief Alfredo Atanasof said Sept. 24 that the Duhalde government would pay $329 million due by the end of September and continue negotiations with the IMF. Argentina owes the IMF, World Bank and IADB another $836 million in October, $295 million in November and $790 million in December, according to its Economy Ministry. Duhalde's government is divided internally over making these scheduled repayments without first signing a firm agreement with the IMF, Buenos Aires daily La Nacion reports. However, Kohler's Sept. 23 remarks indicate that the IMF will not sign an aid deal with Duhalde that would carry Argentina through the end of 2003 without political guarantees that all of the conditions attached to such an agreement would be fully complied with by Duhalde as well as his successor, who won't be elected until March 2003 and will not assume the presidency until next May. Although the IMF's position may be financially and politically prudent from the fund's perspective, Duhalde simply does not have sufficient popular and political support to assure that his government could fully comply -- for longer than a few weeks -- with any agreement it signs with the IMF. Recent opinion polls show that Duhalde is unpopular with more than 90 percent of the adult population, and Congress and the courts have undermined his economic reform policies. The impasse between the IMF and Duhalde's government cannot be solved in Buenos Aires, because Argentina's unpopular and isolated president does not have the political influence to compel
argentina
Latest Columns 09/25 00:19 Argentine Workers Seize Factories, Assets as Recession Deepens By Helen Murphy Buenos Aires, Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Domingo Ibanez has a new boss: himself. Six months ago he and 44 other workers seized the bankrupt ice-cream flavoring factory where they worked. Now the plant in Barracas, a Buenos Aires neighborhood of derelict food factories, runs at about one-tenth capacity to produce 2 tons of flavorings a day. Supervisors, administrative staff, laborers and cleaners share profits equally, each earning about 25 centavos ($0.07) an hour. ``All we want is to keep the factory open,'' said Ibanez, 53, as he mixed a vat of butterscotch syrup. ``The alternative is unemployment, and I'd probably never get another job.'' As Argentina's four-year recession forces companies out of business, workers have commandeered the factories, machinery and inventories of more than 100 former employers in the last nine months, either to save their jobs or in lieu of back pay. Authorities turn a blind eye to such seizures in a country with unemployment at 22 percent and half the population in poverty. ``Argentina is going back to the Dark Ages,'' said Oscar Liberman, chief economist at Fundacion Mercado, a think tank. ``When the government doesn't provide solutions to the people's problems they will look for their own solutions.'' Factory seizures are just one consequence of the economic crisis in Argentina, sparked when the government defaulted on $95 billion of debt, restricted withdrawals from bank accounts and devalued the currency eight months ago. Unable to pay debt or raise financing, and with demand for their goods dwindling, more than 500 companies have gone bankrupt and thousands of others closed down, swelling the number of workers who are either unemployed or with only part-time jobs to 5.6 million. Thousands Comb Streets Many who have taken over the means of production receive little more than their bus fare to work and a hot meal in the canteen. Ibanez, who has worked at the flavorings plant since it opened 30 years ago, says he counts himself lucky not to be one of the thousands who comb the streets of Buenos Aires each night for food, newspapers, cardboard and cans to sell. The 100 cooperatives created this year employ about 10,000 people, or 2 percent of Argentina's actively employed workforce. Many are part of the country's food industry, including Frigorifico Yaguane, a slaughterhouse in Gonzalez Catan, a town just south of Buenos Aires, and the Cooperativa Lactea dairy products company in Las Flores, a rural community in Buenos Aires province. Other people have turned to crime. More than one violent crime is committed every minute in Argentina, according to police figures, and theft is spreading. Between January and June, kidnappings in the greater Buenos Aires area rose six-fold from a year earlier. Crime Supports Business Some of that crime supports business. At Pablo Fromini's metal workshop on the shantytown outskirts of Buenos Aires, Fromini pays 3.2 pesos a kilo (2.2 pounds) for copper wire he says is probably stolen. ``I don't care where it comes from as long as I can make a living,'' said Fromini, adding that he receives hundreds of offers a day from people selling wire. Argentina's telephone, railroad and electricity companies say theft of copper wire is rife. Edenor SA estimates 7 kilometers (4.4 miles) of wire is stolen from it each month, said Alberto Lippi, a spokesman for the Buenos Aires electricity distributor. Dismissed workers pressure former employers to make good on unpaid salaries by holding assets for ransom. At Lavalan, a wool processor that went bankrupt in February, sacked workers have blocked 500 tons of unwashed fleece from leaving the company's plant in Avellaneda, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Fight With Police ``They owe us money,'' said Santiago Maldonado, who worked at the plant for 22 years. Early this month, Maldonado and other pickets fought off police who had been sent to enforce a court order to return the wool to one of its owners, Marcelo Fowler. He values it at $300,000. ``Nowadays the mob can appropriate goods and the authorities are afraid to do anything,'' said Fowler. ``We're heading back to the days after the Russian Revolution.'' Police now stand guard outside the plant, though they haven't made further efforts to recover the wool. Luis Cara, a lawyer who gives legal advice to workers seeking to set up cooperatives and acts as an intermediary between them and former employers, says plant seizures sometimes are the only way employees can receive their due. ``The owners usually owe at least 10 months in back pay, and that's almost impossible to get back,'' said Cara. ``I help them get organized in secret and make the most of their situation.'' Ownership Granted If the past is a guide, workers at the flavorings factory and elsewhere may be able to hold onto their appropriated assets. Courts gave workers
Argentina
Well, my source was wrong. Argentina says that it will not use its bank reserves to bail out the IMF. Come on, Mat, tell us more about it. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Argentina capitulates???
Does yesterday's story that Argentina had agreed to use its bank reserves to pay that the IMF mean that that the government has capitulated? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Argentina capitulates???
Michael - There are mixed signals. Some officials said they would use reserves to make payments, some said they would under certain conditions, some said they would make their September payment, but not October, etc. See, e.g.,: http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20020924-033746-5194r If you have something different, please share the link. Mat
PBS on Argentina
Last night's Wide Angle Public TV documentary on Argentina was an eye-opener. Eschewing any kind of political or economic analysis of how the country ended up in the desperate situation it is in today, it focused on a handful of individuals who are emblematic of the country's fitful attempt to adjust to what amounts to Great Depression type conditions. The title of the show was The Empty ATM since it concentrated mostly on the inability of Argentinians to withdraw money from frozen savings accounts that--in addition--have lost most of their value since the government enacted a series of financial reforms. One woman's savings plummeted from $118,000 to $18,000 in a single year. Even then, she could not withdraw more than a pittance from an ATM in a single week. In an attempt to survive, many are involved in a barter economy which uses an informal currency based on credits. People congregate at huge indoor spaces to exchange services like haircuts or household goods. A barter kingpin who is shown racing from town to town to set up new centers tells us that this is the best way to deal with the hardships and not to waste time protesting. It also included contestants participating in Human Resources, a TV show where one competes for a modest job, like a sales clerk, instead of one million dollars or a trip around the world. Tuesday's NY Times had an article on the show: On Camera, Jobless Argentines Vie for a Livelihood By LARRY ROHTER BUENOS AIRES, Aug. 6 Other countries may have television programs that lure entrants with offers of a million dollars, a new car or a luxury vacation in a tropical clime. But in this nation of broken finances and shattered dreams, contestants on a popular new game show compete for a prize that is increasingly rare and precious: a paying job. Broadcast five days a week, the hourlong program known as Human Resources pits two unemployed people in a contest to win a guaranteed six-month work contract. They relate their life stories and answer questions that test their ability to perform the duties they are seeking. Then viewers vote by telephone to decide which of the two should get the coveted job. On Monday, the prize was a position as a sales clerk at a bakery in a suburb of the Argentine capital. Both contestants were pleasant young women who have been unable to find work since finishing high school. Fátima Rueda, an 18-year-old single mother, and Nadia Bravo, 20, pleaded tearfully with the viewing audience. I feel helpless without work, said one. I feel empty, confessed the other. After every commercial break, a well-groomed blond hostess, much in the mold of Vanna White, urged viewers to call a toll-free number to support their favorite. On the air since mid-April, Human Resources is a reflection of a new national obsession in a country of 37 million that until recently was the most prosperous in Latin America. As the Argentine economy continues to contract in a collapse that is now the statistical equivalent of the Great Depression, fears of being pulled into the black hole are growing, especially among the middle class. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/07/international/americas/07ARGE.html --- Afterwards Joseph Stiglitz spoke to an interviewer for about 10 minutes in a phony, hand-wringing exercise. He blamed IMF shortsightedness for Argentina's woes and emphasized the need for expanded trade to get the country on its feet again. He specifically cited Mexico's rebound after 1995 as what Argentina needed, implicitly giving his approval to NAFTA and other forms of free trade liberalization. You can watch this excerpt at: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/argentina/index.html You can also get an analysis of what went wrong in Argentina from Daniel Yergin, the author of The Commanding Heights, a paean to the kind of privatization and deregulation that has had such devastating results. Yergin says: When did Argentina embark on this distinctive path? After all, Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world. The answer starts with Juan Perón. Now best remembered as the husband of Evita, Perón emerged as Argentina's strongman in the years after World War II. The embodiment of nationalistic populism, Perón built on the prewar legacy of fascist ideas, turning Argentina into a corporatist country, with powerful organized interest groups -- big business, labor unions, military, farmers -- that negotiated with the government for position and resources. Perón nationalized large parts of the economy, put up trade barriers, and cut Argentina's links to the world economy -- long the source of its great wealth. Perón was also wildly popular -- until Evita's death in 1952. Thereafter, however, the economy became so chaotic that he prudently went into exile. Of course, Argentina's troubles begin with the overthrow of Peron. Contrary to the mendacious Yergin, Perón was much more of a social
Re: Re: PBS show on Argentina
From: Anthony D'Costa [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Fri, 9 Aug 2002, Carl Remick wrote: I just saw that PBS show on Argentina that Lou recommended earlier, The Empty ATM. Quite interesting, especially the Stiglitz interview at the end. One memorable quote from an Argentine: In a land where everyone protests, nothing gets done. Of course, looking at the US, it seems clear that in a land where few protest, nothing productive gets done either. Carl Now what does productive mean, to poke a hornet's nest? Cheers, Anthony As I define it, it means virtually any action at all aimed at repairing the ravages of 20+ years of free-market idolatry. Carl _ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
Re: PBS on Argentina
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] It also included contestants participating in Human Resources, a TV show where one competes for a modest job, like a sales clerk, instead of one million dollars or a trip around the world. Human Resources was a sad spectacle -- as grotesque as the show Queen for a Day that appeared on US TV many years ago. Afterwards Joseph Stiglitz spoke to an interviewer for about 10 minutes in a phony, hand-wringing exercise. He blamed IMF shortsightedness for Argentina's woes and emphasized the need for expanded trade to get the country on its feet again. He specifically cited Mexico's rebound after 1995 as what Argentina needed, implicitly giving his approval to NAFTA and other forms of free trade liberalization. Plus, JS noted that Argentine beef is very tasty, a pitch certain to appeal to ever-widening US viewers ;-) Carl _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
Re: Re: PBS on Argentina
Plus, JS noted that Argentine beef is very tasty, a pitch certain to appeal to ever-widening US viewers ;-) Carl If I run into Stiglitz on the Columbia campus, I might ask him what he thinks of Cuba, especially in light of his successor James Wolfensohn has to say: ''Cuba has done a great job on education and health.They have done a good job, and it does not embarrass me to admit it.'' It is interesting that both Stiglitz and fellow chastened economist Jeffrey Sachs end up here. I suspect that being a former gung-ho privatizer and deregulationist enhances one's career nowadays.
Re: Re: Re: PBS on Argentina
Louis Proyect wrote: Plus, JS noted that Argentine beef is very tasty, a pitch certain to appeal to ever-widening US viewers ;-) Carl If I run into Stiglitz on the Columbia campus, I might ask him what he thinks of Cuba, especially in light of his successor James Wolfensohn has to say: ''Cuba has done a great job on education and health.They have done a good job, and it does not embarrass me to admit it.'' It is interesting that both Stiglitz and fellow chastened economist Jeffrey Sachs end up here. I suspect that being a former gung-ho privatizer and deregulationist enhances one's career nowadays. I'm going to have Stiglitz on my radio show next Thursday, so I'll ask him. Stiggy didn't need anything to enhance his career. There was a reason he was long regarded as a certain Nobel prize winner. You could argue that it's rather amazing that his reputation has survived his apostasy. Doug
Re: Re: Re: PBS on Argentina
From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] If I run into Stiglitz on the Columbia campus, I might ask him what he thinks of Cuba, especially in light of his successor James Wolfensohn has to say: ''Cuba has done a great job on education and health.They have done a good job, and it does not embarrass me to admit it.'' It is interesting that both Stiglitz and fellow chastened economist Jeffrey Sachs end up here. I suspect that being a former gung-ho privatizer and deregulationist enhances one's career nowadays. [You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, so to speak. From Paul Krugman's column in today's NY Times:] Why hasn't [Latin American free-market] reform worked as promised? That's a difficult and disturbing question. I, too, bought into much though not all of the Washington consensus; but now it's time, as Berkeley's Brad DeLong puts it, to mark my beliefs to market. And my confidence that we've been giving good advice is way down. One has to sympathize with Latin political leaders who want to temper enthusiasm for free markets with more efforts to protect workers and the poor. [http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/09/opinion/09KRUG.html] Carl _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
PBS show on Argentina
I just saw that PBS show on Argentina that Lou recommended earlier, The Empty ATM. Quite interesting, especially the Stiglitz interview at the end. One memorable quote from an Argentine: In a land where everyone protests, nothing gets done. Of course, looking at the US, it seems clear that in a land where few protest, nothing productive gets done either. Carl _ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
Re: PBS show on Argentina
Now what does productive mean, to poke a hornet's nest? Cheers, Anthony xxx Anthony P. D'Costa, Associate Professor Comparative International Development University of WashingtonCampus Box 358436 1900 Commerce Street Tacoma, WA 98402, USA Phone: (253) 692-4462 Fax : (253) 692-5718 xxx On Fri, 9 Aug 2002, Carl Remick wrote: I just saw that PBS show on Argentina that Lou recommended earlier, The Empty ATM. Quite interesting, especially the Stiglitz interview at the end. One memorable quote from an Argentine: In a land where everyone protests, nothing gets done. Of course, looking at the US, it seems clear that in a land where few protest, nothing productive gets done either. Carl _ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
Re: Re: We're becoming another Argentina
Thanks Lou, Your contributions are inestimable. We are at another juncture, which you grasp and expresses in your contributions. Thanks! You have singularly altered my perception of what I thought was the Trotskyite movement and individuals. I hope that an old Stalinist dog such as I have shown that a dog can learn new tricks. Trotsky wasn't that bad. Trotskyists are horrible, however.
We're becoming another Argentina
Washington Post, Thursday, August 1, 2002; Page A01 Economic Crisis Swells in S. America By Anthony Faiola Washington Post Foreign Service MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, July 31 -- Several additional South American countries have been swept up in what is becoming the region's worst economic crisis in two decades, igniting fears of a replay of the Latin American financial collapses of the early 1980s. The crisis, which analysts had hoped would be contained to Argentina's financial meltdown six months ago, has now spread to its neighbors Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. It has threatened to engulf other politically unstable economies in the region as well, including Bolivia and Venezuela, where analysts predict deep recessions for this year. But this week, investor flight has particularly hit Argentina's immediate neighbors. In Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, government bonds have fallen to half their face value in recent weeks because of fears of a government default. The Brazilian real, in a tailspin that has lowered its value against the dollar by 19 percent this month, today touched its lowest point since going into circulation as the national currency in 1994. Paraguay has come face-to-face with the prospect of a banking collapse and a deepening recession. Here in tiny Uruguay, dubbed the Switzerland of Latin America for its rock-solid financial system, government officials trying to stave off a debt default are seeking an immediate loan from the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Treasury and other major foreign lenders. To ease the pressure, the Uruguayan government was forced to close banks Tuesday for the first time in 20 years. It decided today to extend the banking holiday until Monday. The closure left many Uruguayans lining up in front of ATMs. We're becoming another Argentina, said Maurice Lopez, 45, a Montevideo store clerk who waited today to withdraw cash from an ATM. I can't believe it has come to this. full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28776-2002Jul31.html
[Fwd: Venezuela and Argentina: A Tale of Two Coups]
Venezuela and Argentina: A Tale of Two Coups by Greg Palast New Internationalist Magazine - July 2002 The big business-led coup in Venezuela failed, where international finance's coup in Argentina has succeeded. Greg Palast gives us the inside track on two very different power-grabs. ** Come see Greg Palast at Politics Prose July 17 or at Border's July 18th at 7 PM Details below ** Blondes in revolt On May Day, starting out from the Hilton Hotel, 200,000 blondes marched East through Caracas' shopping corridor along Casanova Avenue. At the same time, half a million brunettes converged on them from the West. It would all seem like a comic shampoo commercial if 16 people hadn't been shot dead two weeks earlier when the two groups crossed paths. The May Day brunettes support Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. They funnelled down from the ranchos, the pustules of crude red-brick bungalows, stacked one on the other, that erupt on the steep, unstable hillsides surrounding this city of five million. The bricks in some ranchos are new, a recent improvement in these fetid, impromptu slums where many previously sheltered behind cardboard walls. 'Chávez gives them bricks and milk,' a local TV reporter told me, 'and so they vote for him.' Chávez is dark and round as a cola nut. Like his followers, Chávez is an 'Indian'. But the blondes, the 'Spanish', are the owners of Venezuela. A group near me on the blonde march screamed 'Out! Out!' in English, demanding the removal of the President. One edible-oils executive, in high heels, designer glasses and push-up bra had turned out, she said: 'To fight for democracy.' She added: 'We'll try to do it institutionally,' a phrase that meant nothing to me until a banker in pale pink lipstick explained that to remove Chávez, 'we can't wait until the next election'. The anti-Chavistas don't equate democracy with voting. With 80 per cent of Venezuela's population at or below the poverty level, elections are not attractive to the protesting financiers. Chávez had won the election in 1998 with a crushing 58 per cent of the popular vote and that was unlikely to change except at gunpoint. And so on 12 April the business leadership of Venezuela, backed by a few 'Spanish' generals, turned their guns on the Presidential Palace and kidnapped Chávez. Pedro Carmona, the chief of Fedecamaras, the nation's confederation of business and industry, declared himself President. This coup, one might say, was the ultimate in corporate lobbying. Within hours, he set about voiding the 49 Chávez laws that had so annoyed the captains of industry, executives of the foreign oil companies and latifundistas, the big plantation owners. The banker's embrace Carmona had dressed himself in impressive ribbons and braids for the inauguration. In the Miraflores ballroom, filled with the Venezuelan élite, Ignazio Salvatierra, president of the Banker's Association, signed his name to Carmona's self-election with a grand flourish. The two hugged emotionally as the audience applauded. Carmona then decreed the dissolution of his nation's congress and supreme court while the business peopled clapped and chanted, 'Democracia! Democracia!' I later learned the Cardinal of Caracas had led Carmona into the Presidential Palace, a final Genet-esque touch to this delusional drama. This fantasy would evaporate ?by the crowing of the cock,? as Chávez told me in his poetic way. Chávez minister Miguel Bustamante-Madriz, who had escaped the coup, led 60,000 brunettes down from Barrio Petare to Miraflores. As thousands marched against the coup, Caracas television stations, owned by media barons who supported (and possibly planned the coup) played soap operas. The station owned hoped their lack of coverage would keep the Chavista crowd from swelling; but it doubled and doubled and doubled. On l3 April, they were ready to die for Chávez. They did not have to. Carmona, fresh from his fantasy inaugural, received a call from the head of a pro-Chávez paratroop regiment stationed in Maracay, outside the capital. To avoid bloodshed, Chávez had agreed to his own 'arrest' and removal by the putschists, but did not mention to the plotters that several hundred loyal troops had entered secret corridors under the Palace. Carmona, surrounded, could choose his method of death: bullets from the inside, rockets from above, or dismemberment by the encircling 'bricks and milk' crowd. Carmona took off his costume ribbons and surrendered. Taking on the oil giants I interviewed Carmona while I leaned out the fourth floor window of an apartment in La Alombra, a high-rise building complex. I spoke my pidgin Spanish across to his balcony on the building a few yards away. The one-time petrochemical mogul was under house arrest - the lucky bastard. If he had attempted to overthrow the President
The next Argentina?
Wednesday, July 3, 2002 Is China the Next Argentina? China's sagging economy is threatening to turn China into an Asian version of Argentina, a top financial journal warns. Unless it can patch up the situation, China risks becoming Asia's Argentina... the people's Republic can go from boom to bust in just a few short years, wrote Gordon Chang in the June 19, Asian Wall Street Journal as quoted by the authoritative American Foreign Policy Council. According to Chang, both countries crammed their banks full of bonds, created growth by playing money games and attracting foreign direct investment... Argentina, he wrote deferred reforms by living on foreign capital, and China is playing this same game, too... When the flow of international capital tightens again, China's deteriorating fiscal and debt conditions will come under international scrutiny. High expectations for the Chinese economy are grossly exaggerated he warned, explaining that China's economic growth is declining and its banking system is disarray, posing a threat of destabilization to the international economy. . Chang reported that Beijing authorities describe China's economic outlook with words such as 'grim' and 'grave,' yet some foreign experts are continuing to say that everything is just fine and dandy in the People's Republic of China. He cited the official figures - which he said tend to exaggerate China's output yet still show growth declined in each quarter of last year... There is also a more fundamental matter of how could a country record high growth when it is experiencing worsening deflation and massive unemployment. Signs of China's economic problems described by Chang: The central government amounts for more than two-thirds of investment in the country, which he says is alarming by any standard; China's ever-larger budget deficits as shown by the record one of $37.5 billion announced for the coming year China's annual deficit has already zoomed past 3% of the GDP, the international recognized safety limit. The current pace is unsustainable and out of control, he wrote. Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng has just one word for China's recent spending, calling it 'reckless.' China as the next Argentina?' he asks, adding that even though it sounds preposterous today, it is worth remembering that Argentina did not have to go through the shock therapy of joining the World Trade Organization which resulted in China's losing control of the timetable to reform its banking system. The largest state banks are insolvent, as a group perhaps the weakest in the world, he reports, adding that Beijing must either rehabilitate them in the next five years to the tune of $500 billion - or face the failure and the collapse of the economy itself. Beijing talks a lot about structural reform but has implemented very little of it these past few years, Chang concludes. In this upcoming period of political transition, [with jockeying for the upcoming Communist Party leadership changes at hand]the paralysis will become even more evident... The critical issue is time. Peasants and workers are impatient... Despite progress, many Chinese today are hungry, angry and, worst of all, desperate. Beijing's leaders know how to use the coercive power of the state to keep a lid on unrest. Yet, force is only a short-term solution. Time is running out.
Re: The next Argentina?
- Original Message - From: Steve Diamond [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unless it can patch up the situation, China risks becoming Asia's Argentina... the people's Republic can go from boom to bust in just a few short years, wrote Gordon Chang in the June 19, Asian Wall Street Journal as quoted by the authoritative American Foreign Policy Council. === Right wing China bashers. http://www.afpc.org According to Chang, both countries crammed their banks full of bonds, created growth by playing money games and attracting foreign direct investment... Argentina, he wrote deferred reforms by living on foreign capital, and China is playing this same game, too... When the flow of international capital tightens again, China's deteriorating fiscal and debt conditions will come under international scrutiny. High expectations for the Chinese economy are grossly exaggerated he warned, explaining that China's economic growth is declining and its banking system is disarray, posing a threat of destabilization to the international economy. . Chang reported that Beijing authorities describe China's economic outlook with words such as 'grim' and 'grave,' yet some foreign experts are continuing to say that everything is just fine and dandy in the People's Republic of China. He cited the official figures - which he said tend to exaggerate China's output yet still show growth declined in each quarter of last year... There is also a more fundamental matter of how could a country record high growth when it is experiencing worsening deflation and massive unemployment. Signs of China's economic problems described by Chang: The central government amounts for more than two-thirds of investment in the country, which he says is alarming by any standard; China's ever-larger budget deficits as shown by the record one of $37.5 billion announced for the coming year China's annual deficit has already zoomed past 3% of the GDP, the international recognized safety limit. The current pace is unsustainable and out of control, he wrote. Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng has just one word for China's recent spending, calling it 'reckless.' China as the next Argentina?' he asks, adding that even though it sounds preposterous today, it is worth remembering that Argentina did not have to go through the shock therapy of joining the World Trade Organization which resulted in China's losing control of the timetable to reform its banking system. The largest state banks are insolvent, as a group perhaps the weakest in the world, he reports, adding that Beijing must either rehabilitate them in the next five years to the tune of $500 billion - or face the failure and the collapse of the economy itself. Beijing talks a lot about structural reform but has implemented very little of it these past few years, Chang concludes. In this upcoming period of political transition, [with jockeying for the upcoming Communist Party leadership changes at hand]the paralysis will become even more evident... The critical issue is time. Peasants and workers are impatient... Despite progress, many Chinese today are hungry, angry and, worst of all, desperate. Beijing's leaders know how to use the coercive power of the state to keep a lid on unrest. Yet, force is only a short-term solution. Time is running out.
Repression in Argentina
Dear Louis, Could you forward this text about the repression in Argentina to a variety of US leftist lists/sites, and request further publicity. It's in Spanish, which means there it might be difficult for some, but there are many who speak it, so... If anybody is interested in making a quick translation of it, that would be great. Thanks. Gregory Schwartz === Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2001 14:47:44 -0300 From: Mabel Bellucci [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Mabel Bellucci [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: SEAMOS TODOS COSTEKI Y SANTILLAN SEAMOS TODOS COSTEKI Y SANTILLAN Mabel Bellucci - Ana Dinerstein Frente a la dramática represión llevada a cabo contra la toma del Puente Pueyrredón en Avellaneda, por parte del Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (MTD) de la Coordinadora Aníbal Verón, básicamente la mayoría de los programas políticos y noticieros televisivos pusieron al desnudo la mirada más reaccionaria de las clases medias hacia este movimiento autónomo, con prácticas de democracia directa y reactivo a las políticas clientelísiticas que implementa tanto el Estado como los partidos políticos. No obstante, se podía esperar que los dirigentes del movimiento Piquetero que tienen prensa, se hicieran cargo de una responsabilidad fundamental: develar, ante una opinión pública que aún duda de quien es el enemigo, esta jugada del poder contra los desocupados y por ende contra todos!. No obstante, queda claro que dichos referentes del ala más institucionalizada del movimiento piquetero se han convertido en figuras prolijas y asimilables para ciertos sectores como es el caso de Luis D´Elía, titular de la Federación de Tierra y Vivienda y dirigente de la Central de Trabajadores Argentinos (CTA). Asimismo, fuerte opositor del Bloque Piquetero Nacional- de cuño de izquierdia partidaria- en el cual la Aníbal Verón no lo integra por disidencias metodológicas y políticas. Luis D´Elía representa lo que el establisment quiere ver de este movimiento: inclinación al diálogo y a la negociación, con una postura no confrontativa y antidisturbio. Cultivar este perfil otorga beneficios: se calcula que D´Elìa maneja aproximadamente 60.000 Planes Trabajar, con todo lo que ello significa en acumulación de poder en una argentina arrasada por la pobreza y el hambre. Debido al tremendo peso de los desocupados en la luchas populares, fue concentrando un rol cada vez más protagónica en el interior de la CTA. Existe el riesgo de que la Central, que se inició como un intento de producir unidad en la diversidad y articulación en un gran movimiento social con diferentes sectores en lucha, se hunda en un clima de internismo que no refleje las prácticas políticas nacidas a partir de la revuelta del 19 y 20 de diciembre. Las declaraciones de D´Elía en torno a la sangrienta jornada escenificada en el Puente Pueyrredón fueron entre patéticas y poco afortunadas contra otro modo de resistir y enfrentar organizativamente el conflicto de la desocupación. Los medios de comunicación utilizaron la clásica muletilla de analizar los acontecimientos desde la violencia generada por los piqueteros de la Coordinadora Aníbal Verón y en cuestionar una puesta en escena de lo esperable. No obstante, son pocos los que replican ese mismo planteo frente a la reacción violenta y, desde ya, justificada de los colectivos de ahorristas que pierden su cordura de clase cuando implementan maratónicamente acciones directas contra las instalaciones bancarias. Incluso, estos modos irruptivos son vistos con buenos ojos ya que la estafa y la violación a la propiedad privada son argumentos que justifican dichas acciones virulentas . En otras palabras, la batería mediática de la teoría de los dos demonios aggionada a los nuevos tiempos, coincide con las últimas declaraciones de Luis D´Elía. Vale decir: no están dirigidas contra el movimiento de piqueteros en general sino contra la Coordinadora Anibal Verón en particular, en tanto que la misma no se ajusta disciplinadamente a las reglas sistémicas e institucionales. Ahora, ya no son víctimas sino victimarios. Si no llevasen capuchas, piedras o palos para defenderse, si no saliesen a poner el cuerpo en un enfrentamiento de lucha desigual, serían ciudadanos pacíficos reclamando por sus derechos perdidos. La sola existencia del piquetero como figura real y simbólica más allá de su discurso y accionar, es violenta porque él es producto de la violencia del capitalismo, la violencia de la moneda y del trabajo alienado. Ante el asesinato despiadado de Maximiliano Costeki y Darío Santillán, sólo podemos decir: Seamos todos Darío y Maximiliano en el momento de su muerte. Sus muertes simbolizan nuestras muertes, fisicas o virtuales. Seamos todos Piqueteros! Mabel Bellucci ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Ana Dinerstein ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Buenos Aires, 30.6.02 Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Forwarded from Nestor (murder in Argentina)
I don´t have all the facts checked to the last point, but it seems that during repression of a group of road blockers on the Pueyrredón bridge in Buenos Aires there has been a casualty. Although none of my cdes. was hit, so far as I know, there are other cdes. of sister and related organizations who have been at the block. The government seems to have decided not to allow a single road block again, probably under strong pressure from the banks and IMF. This should be a signal for those who are still banging on the banks´ doors every day. That is, not only they are killing newborns daily in the hospitals, they have begun to kill people on the streets again. The consequences of the cowardice and perversity of this bourgeois govm´t (and you know that I am very precise in the usage of the word bourgeois) are beginning to rise to the public. We in the PIN are trying to organize something as an answer (maybe a general strike tomorrow, at least this is what we are trying to get the union leaders to decide, both in CTA and MTA -Moyano´s group in the rebel CGT). Please keep the list informed and please suggest cdes. in the First World to help us by mobilizing as much as they can in order to force your govmts to have the IMF out of Argentina!! This time, we need you all more than we ever needed you all. Hug, Nestor Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
An explanation for new repression in Argentina?
NY Times, June 26, 2002 Blows Keep Coming for an Argentina Long in Crisis By LARRY ROHTER BUENOS AIRES, June 25 The president says it may be impossible to reach any agreement with the International Monetary Fund, the head of the central bank is giving up and going home, and the economy minister embarked tonight on a desperate quest to pry $18 billion from foreign lenders. For Argentina, an already disastrous economic crisis is suddenly threatening to become even more calamitous. Argentina needs a very rapid agreement, but it doesn't depend on us, a dejected President Eduardo Duhalde said in a television appearance here late on Monday. I hope we don't have to wait until September, because the situation in the region is getting worse every day. Mr. Duhalde spoke shortly after Mario Blejer, the president of the central bank and a former I.M.F. official with extensive contacts on Wall Street, said he was stepping down. His departure leaves the economy minister, Roberto Lavagna, who departed tonight for three days of meetings with the country's creditors in New York and Washington, as the undisputed chief of the government's economic team. The resignation of Mr. Blejer, 53, an economist with a doctorate from the University of Chicago, was not a great surprise. His health problems and his desire to rejoin his family, which lives in the United States, were widely known here, and he had earlier told Mr. Duhalde that he would stay in his post only until an agreement could be reached with the fund. But clashes with Mr. Lavagna, especially over how to end a freeze on bank deposits that has crippled Argentina's banking system since December, hastened Mr. Blejer's decision; he is to leave his post at the end of the week. Investors reacted by pushing the value of the Argentine peso down 2.5 percent today to 3.86 to the dollar; it was pegged at one to the dollar for a decade until early January. Mr. Blejer is to be succeeded by his deputy, Aldo Pignanelli, a little-known Peronist party loyalist who played a role in recent efforts to keep several banks from collapsing. In his letter of resignation, Mr. Blejer complained that the central bank's independence has been weakened repeatedly in recent times and urged the government not to submit it to self-interested pressures. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/26/business/worldbusiness/26ARGE.html Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Argentina: capitalism is a dirty word
In Argentina capitalism is a dirty word, so executives set up 'feed the kids' website By TONY SMITH, AP Business Writer BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - With Argentina slumped in its fourth year of recession, cash-strapped banks can't pay out their customers' savings. Ordinary folk are reduced to bartering for basic foods. Unemployment is so high that 3,500 people a day join the ranks of the officially poor. Who's to blame? Capitalism, according to many Argentines. Rightly or wrongly, many of this once prosperous country's residents hold free-market policies responsible for much of their misery so a group of young professionals is finding it pays to be an ethical executive. Or it would be if they accepted wages. Adapting the business model of The Hunger Site, a U.S.-based charity website, a group of young, professionals volunteered to launch www.porloschicos.com which translates as forthekids.com to feed hungry children in a fast-growing Villa Miseria, or shantytown, on Buenos Aires' outskirts. Every time a visitor clicks on the site's donate a free meal button, one child gets fed. In return, sponsors get advertising space. Simple. And, it seems, effective. In the first month, corporate giants such as Citibank and Coca Cola financed 82,000 rations in Margarita Barrientos' 'Los Piletones' food kitchen in Villa Soldato. The site currently gets between 12,000 and 15,000 hits a day, according to co-founder Bryan Droznes. The average age of the volunteers is 25 and their professions range from architect to accountant. After four years of bitter recession, 18 million Argentines nearly half the population now live below the official poverty line, measured as families of four with incomes of less than 485 pesos ($160) a month, enough to pay for basic food and housing. Even those who can still afford to eat are furious at a banking freeze that has cooped up most of their hard-earned savings in the tottering financial system. The government wants to pay them back in long-term bonds. All this is producing a popular outpouring of rage against free-market policies that started to transform Argentina's economy in the 1990s. But because the government did not rein in public spending and financed largesse with foreign debt, the economy finally collapsed late last year. The country defaulted on its $141 billion public debt and the peso has slumped 70 percent against the dollar. Capitalism in Argentina has become a dirty word, profit has become a dirty word, said Droznes, a young investment banker at Salomon Smith Barney. As a result, he says, corporate social responsibility is a top priority among companies in Argentina today. So far, Droznes has signed up Coca-Cola, Citibank and local candy-maker Arcor as sponsors. But he is most interested in getting small and medium-sized companies involved, traditionally the backbone of Argentina's economy. With banner-sharing and ad rotation, smaller companies can contribute as little as 200 pesos ($65) a month, he said. In the past they have felt the need to help but also felt they didn't have the means. The site is fiercely independent of government agencies and religious groups. It has devised a foolproof way of sidestepping a problem faced by many charity organizations in developing nations endemic corruption. All sponsors' payments to the site are done by traceable wire transfer and are immediately converted into meal tickets supervised by French company Accor and given to the food kitchen. Food companies, which can donate rations in exchange for ad space, must deliver them to the kitchen's door, cutting out any go-betweens, Droznes said. Tough times have also brought a rising sense of social responsibility among the population, according to Mariana Battaglini of leading newspaper La Nacion's charitable foundation. For nearly two years, the paper has published for free clasificados solidarios a page of small ads by nonprofit organizations seeking medical supplies, food, clothing and other donations. It also publishes solidarity supplements advising people on nutrition and hunger, and giving nonprofit organizations advice on fund-raising in times of crisis. Capitalists? Bankers? I have no words to describe them, said Ana Rodriguez, a furrier at an informal barter market in the heart of Buenos Aires' financial district. We set up our stalls here to show the bankers what they have done to our economy, she said, closing her last trade of the day swapping an orange fur stole she made for three bread rolls. All we want is to be paid for an honest day's work. It's that sentiment that has made a hit out of a new weeknight game show called Human Resources that interviews contestants for the top prize a job. What we are trying to do here is underscore the importance of work, so our politicians realize that citizens have a right to work and that work gives them dignity, said Nestor Ibarra, the show's host. On this program, we secure 22 jobs a month
The Collapse of Argentina part 4 (conclusion): the incredible shrinking economy
On July 15, 1955, two months before he was overthrown by the military, Juan Perón said: The Perónist Revolution has ended; now begins a new constitutional stage without revolution I have ceased to be the leader of the National Revolution in order to become President of all the Argentines. The notion that he could unite all Argentines regardless of class is, of course, false. While Perón was not what one could call a theoretician, he did try to put forward a rudimentary class analysis in Force is the Right of Beasts. According to Donald Hodges, he interpreted the 1955 military coup as a showdown between two classes. In Hodges's words, there was the productive class of manual, technical and intellectual workers who allegedly consumed only what they produced; and the parasitic class consisting of the oligarchy, the clergy, and the professional politicians who lived off the surplus created by the productive class. This alignment, which evoked the political philosophy of Saint-Simon, could not begin to do justice to the complex social relationships within Argentina and on an international level in the mid-1950s. Rather it evoked the French Revolution with its notion of a parasitic class. Missing from this account is any explanation why the fraction of the national bourgeoisie based in manufacturing, as well as large segments of the professional middle-classes, would abandon his Justicialist project. Surely, the answer was not treason, but rather diverse classes acting on distinct material interests. Perón had failed to realize that the national industrial bourgeoisie had already begun to become integrated with North American capital. In some ways this paralleled the symbiotic, but dependent, relationship the pampas bourgeoisie had to British capital a century earlier. During his years in exile, Perón always believed that the alliance between the working class and the industrial bourgeoisie could be reconstituted, but inexorable economic processes would militate against that outcome. From 1955 until his return to power in 1973, the Argentine bourgeoisie would find itself more and more co-opted by US imperialism or--alternatively--put out of business. The objective conditions for a neo-Perónist project would have been eroded beyond repair long before his arrival at the Ezeiza airport in 1973. To start with, Perónism had opened the door a crack to US business for reasons that had nothing to do with an ideological affinity for Uncle Sam. Of course, once that door was opened, the jackboot of the US multinational would come crashing through. We should recall that Perón had instituted a sweeping program of nationalizations that affected European interests generally and Great Britain in particular. As such, the US became the logical trading partner, despite the fact that Great Britain conspired with Washington to block the ability of Argentina to buy American capital equipment as I discussed in my last post. Argentina was also forced to look to the United States because of the limitations of Perónist economic policy, which fell far short of socialism. By failing to carry out radical land reform and failing to nationalize agro-export related industries, such as meatpacking and sugar refining, etc., Argentina failed to provide an adequate financial basis for future industrial development. By contrast, the seizure of Cuban sugar, tobacco and cattle production had not only created a strong base of support for the revolution among field-hands, it had also helped to make foreign exchange available for native industry such as the new bioengineering enterprises. In the aftermath of the overthrow of Perón, solutions were put forward that combined deeper integration into imperialism with half-baked developmentalist theories. Perhaps nobody exemplified these contradictory impulses more than Raul Prebisch, whose Prebisch Plan was adopted both by the military coup that removed Perón in 1955 and by the Arturo Frondizi government that succeeded it (1958-1962). Prebisch was the commissioner of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) prior to his involvement with the post-Perón regimes. In this capacity, he developed a theory of import substitution which urged peripheral countries to foster native industry in a protectionist framework or else risk being swamped by the vastly superior power of core nations. He was a major influence on other UN economists, including Brazil's Celso Furtado, Samir Amin and Andre Gunder Frank--all of whom would become identified with the dependency school of the 1960s grouped around the Monthly Review. Unlike those whom he influenced, Prebisch was no leftist. As an economic adviser to the military government that ruled Argentina prior to Perón, he proposed the creation of a central bank, whose directorship he would occupy between 1935 and 1943. During this period, Prebisch was deeply involved
paper on Argentina
http://www.dieoff.com/page229.pdf ~~~ PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Re: Argentina sacrificed for bankruptcy reform
Here is the thing Michael, It is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing. I live quite peacefully with many people I disagree with and indeed am known by many as quite a gentle person. Here is what I heard from someone when I defended Michael Pugliese the other day, when that person, also a friend, accused him with some silly thing without any proof: Sabri, thanks as always for your kind and considerate comments. Also, on another occasion, after I made an appeal to Michael Pugliese to correct an unintentional mistake he made, here is what he wrote to me: after all I know you to be a good comrade and gentleman. Now, if I am such a gentleman, why am I not the same gentleman when it comes to Chris? If you attack people, intentionally or unintentionally, they will attack you back. If you ask them an intelligent question, most likely they will think for an intelligent answer. Chris needs to learn this and I don't care if he is offended or not. He offends more people than he can comprehend. If we are going to change the world, we better start with ourselves. But I don't see in him that kind of an ability. Sabri THE STRANGEST CREATURE ON EARTH Youre like a scorpion, my brother, you live in cowardly darkness like a scorpion. Youre like a sparrow, my brother, always in a sparrows flutter. Youre like a clam, my brother, closed like a clam, content, And youre frightening, my brother, like the mouth of an extinct volcano. Not one, not five- unfortunately, you number millions. Youre like a sheep, my brother: when the cloaked drover raises his stick, you quickly join the flock and run, almost proudly, to the slaughterhouse. I mean youre strangest creature on earth- even stranger than the fish that couldnt see the ocean for the water. And the oppression in this world is thanks to you. And if were hungry, tired, covered with blood, and still being crushed like grapes for our wine, the fault is yours- I can hardly bring myself to say it, but most of the fault, my dear brother, is yours. Nazim Hikmet - 1947 + I hope that Sabri was not being serious when he wrote his post. We can differ on politics without getting upset with each other. The delete key is a more pleasant way to communicate under some circumstances. On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 10:47:31PM +0100, Chris Burford wrote: Sabri Oncu I am offended that you address me as My friend and sign your letter love (or as on another list, hugs), when you say you usually try to avoid reading my emails. Please avoid them, bin them, or filter them out. If you wish the reply to the point in question either agree or disagree with reasoned arguments, not with patronising personal forms of address. We differ on some important questions. That is not the end of the world. It is usually impossible to read all the posts on a email list. We are not compelled to read each others posts. If it is more productive to pursue debates with other list members, so be it. Chris Burford
Re: Argentina sacrificed for bankruptcy reform
Chris writes: As the petering out of Argentinean revolutionary hopes now shows. So much for revolutionary bravado that fails to look at the actual balance of forces. Demoralising and demobilising My Friend, I told you once, I am telling you for the second time: your style is annoying and hardly helps you achieve your goal, whatever your goal is. I try to avoid your e-mails usually but as an archive reader, clicking on that blue line is so easy that sometimes I fail to control myself. I wish I had subscribed to the two list I see your posts on in the individual mails mode so that I could have filtered your mails out. Forget about revolutionary, or even reformist, response to global finance capital. It is not going to happen. The response will be nationalist in my opinion and, no matter what you and I say, we will not be able to change much. Further, I don't think there exists anything like global finance capital. Global finance capital is just a myth. There are finance capitals, some regional, some national and they are not as integrated as you think they are. They just look integrated to an outsider. Love, Sabri
Re: Argentina sacrificed for bankruptcy reform
Chris Burford: As the petering out of Argentinan revolutionary hopes now shows. So much for revolutionary bravado that fails to look at the actual balance of forces. Demoralising and demobilising. What in the world are you talking about? There has been little evidence in Argentina of support for a socialist revolution. There is a crisis of confidence in existing institutions, from the political parties to the trade unions. This does not translate into the sort of movement that existed, for example, in Weimar Germany where there was a Communist Party numbering 350,000 members that attempted to take power numerous times. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Re: Argentina sacrificed for bankruptcy reform
Sabri Oncu I am offended that you address me as My friend and sign your letter love (or as on another list, hugs), when you say you usually try to avoid reading my emails. Please avoid them, bin them, or filter them out. If you wish the reply to the point in question either agree or disagree with reasoned arguments, not with patronising personal forms of address. We differ on some important questions. That is not the end of the world. It is usually impossible to read all the posts on a email list. We are not compelled to read each others posts. If it is more productive to pursue debates with other list members, so be it. Chris Burford
Re: Re: Re: Argentina sacrificed for bankruptcy reform
I hope that Sabri was not being serious when he wrote his post. We can differ on politics without getting upset with each other. The delete key is a more pleasant way to communicate under some circumstances. On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 10:47:31PM +0100, Chris Burford wrote: Sabri Oncu I am offended that you address me as My friend and sign your letter love (or as on another list, hugs), when you say you usually try to avoid reading my emails. Please avoid them, bin them, or filter them out. If you wish the reply to the point in question either agree or disagree with reasoned arguments, not with patronising personal forms of address. We differ on some important questions. That is not the end of the world. It is usually impossible to read all the posts on a email list. We are not compelled to read each others posts. If it is more productive to pursue debates with other list members, so be it. Chris Burford -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Argentina sacrificed for bankruptcy reform
If marxists disdain to take an interest in reform of global economic structures on the grounds of focusing on revolutions within countries alone, they will leave the agenda at best to capitalist reformers like Gordon Brown. Brown is rationalising the already highly socialised functions of global finance capital. This report is based on British sources and is about how the USA is following Gordon Brown's lead. It *would* make a difference whether the new system of bankruptcy for individual countries should be run by the IMF or the United Nations. Even though either way no revolutionary response to the demands of global finance capital is possible. As the petering out of Argentinan revolutionary hopes now shows. So much for revolutionary bravado that fails to look at the actual balance of forces. Demoralising and demobilising. Chris Burford London Charlotte Denny Monday April 29, 2002 The Guardian ... Now the G7 is trying to prove that it is tough enough to stand aside and watch a country suffer and unfortunately for Argentina, it has become the guinea pig. Limiting big bailouts is a necessary reform, but there is as yet no alternative system in place for dealing with sovereign bankruptcies. Last weekend G7 finance ministers discussed a twin-track approach, however, with changes to bond contracts and a new international legal framework for dealing with bankrupt countries. The US is keener on the pursuing the first approach, which it sees as more market orientated. In future, all bond contracts will contain collective action clauses allowing for a majority of creditors to agree to a restructuring deal. Such clauses are common in bonds issued in London but not in the New York market, with the result that so-called rogue creditors can hold out for full payment. In some cases, by threatening legal action, they have been able to secure a better deal for themselves at the expense of other lenders. One such creditor, Elliott Associates, a New York hedge fund, recently held up the restructuring of Peru's debts with a court challenge. As the IMF's deputy managing director, Anne Krueger, argues, however, new arrangements in bond contracts are not enough to tackle the problem of insolvent countries. Collective action clauses apply to all the creditors in a particular bond contract - but an indebted country may have many different bonds outstanding as well as bank loans and official debts. Agreement still has to be secured between different classes of creditors. Ms Krueger has called for an international legal framework which uses some of the features of domestic bankruptcy systems. Countries would be able to declare a payments standstill while they negotiated a restructuring deal with creditors. Litigation would be prohibited while the deal was being worked out. It would only be able to be used if a country's debt burden were clearly unsustainable. The idea of an international bankruptcy system is as old as Adam Smith and most recently was proposed by the debt campaigners, Jubilee 2000. While Jubilee would prefer to see a UN appointed body adjudicate over restructurings, Ms Krueger proposed that the IMF should be in the driving seat. Neither idea was received with any great enthusiasm by the US. Unsurprisingly, the private sector is not a big cheerleader for reform either, although the official representatives of the banking sector seem to have accepted that it is inevitable. Privately, British officials are optimistic about the chances of progress this time, after years in which reforming the international financial architecture has been on every G7 agenda. Previously the discussion was deadlocked, with the Europeans insisting that fundamental reforms were necessary so that the private sector had to take some of the pain of debt writedowns and the previous US administration preferring to take a case by case approach to crises. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4403334,00.html Chris Burford London
[Fwd: Argentina update: Free fall for Duhalde's Peronism,rebel CGT breaks away]
--- Forwarded message follows --- From: Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date sent: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 09:48:30 -0300 A few lines. A week ago the Argentinean Parliament, seemingly under the inchoate pressure of the multitude (let us quote Negri when it is worth it), and fearing a prairie fire which would burn down to ashes even the personal homes of the Senators and Deputies, voted against a particular law by Remes Lenicov, the most openly pro-IMF Minister of Economy that could be obtained after December 19th.[1] [The above was a _fraction_ of the truth, though an important one. The other parcels worth considering are Duhalde's brutish demeanour vis a vis the Parliament (in fact, he issued an ultimatum against the very body which put him in charge), some defensive reflexes of progressive Peronist deputies -such as Díaz Bancalari- and, most important from what could be seen afterwards, the direct pressure of the pro-IMF governors of the large and heavyweight provinces of Córdoba and Santa Fe, who easily dragged Governor Solá of the definitory Province of Buenos Aires behind them]. Remes was thus forced to resign, and Duhalde was forced to pay attention to the Parliament when ruling. We were facing a new political crisis, and his own Presidency was at stake. Eduardo Duhalde responded to the crisis by returning to the uses of Argentina during the 1830s (and recognizing the actual situation to which the destruction of the national state has brought us): he summoned a meeting of the governors of the provinces who were ready to enter talks with the central government (he even sent some military plane to fetch a couple of governors who -most probably not lying- argued that their provinces were so starved of funds that they could not pay for their own trips to Buenos Aires). The meeting lasted three days or so, and although Duhalde attempted (or is said to have attempted) some kind of mild resistence against the brutal impositions of the IMF, the final result was a completely pro-IMF package. A modification of the laws of economic subversion -which would take, such as it is now, most bankers to jail-, of bankrupcies -in order to make it easier for the banks to grab companies who have failed-, further reduction of the State structures, and a complete stop to the dripping away of the playpen funds -which will make sure that it is the Argentinean middle classes who pay for the megaswindle known as neoliberal economic policy. It will probably not be known whether Duhalde actually resisted these measures or not. If one takes into account the broad face of happiness of the American Ambassador after the meeting agreed on all these sinister points, then one might arrive at the conclusion that he actually did attempt some opposition. [Actually, the intervention existed, it was timely, and had tremendous effect. It came through a telephone call with the Córdoba governor J. M. de la Sota. I do not know if the call was made _by_ de la Sota or he received it during the meeting. But the message, which seems to have arrived _exactly at the moment when Duhalde was exposing his interest in an independent (that is, from IMF) plan for Argentina_, turned things black and white: If you follow such a course, don't expect to have anything to do with Washington any more, or words to that effect. This anecdote portrays the degree of rotten demoralization of the Argentinean traditional leadership] But it is not essential. The fact is that the most openly pro-USA governors (particularly De La Sota, the one who Rodríguez Saá blamed personally for the Coup of State which overthrew him early in January) explained Duhalde that if Argentina did not reinsert herself in the international community, our destiny was to become Albania. And the idiot -or criminal, or whatever- caved in! No offence intended towards Albania, but the sheer comparison is stupid. What we have here is the phenomenon of pedagogic colonization at work. In the meantime, about 65% or 70% of our population is against anything that the points of agreement imply. These figures are the fraction that every survey shows as willing to break up with the IMF forever. So that we will have ever stronger confrontations ahead. Of course, with such a flimsy minded man as Duhalde at the top, one never knows what new ridiculous alleys this tragedy will move along. In the meantime, I am sorry I can't give more info to the friends, but I am very busy organizing some two or three confrontational fronts. We have achieved some successes, and we expect to be quite impressive during the first anti-IMF mobilisation summoned by the rebel CGT of Moyano. In fact, the left wing of Moyano's constituency is openly airing points of view that any serious revolutionary would support. Things are a-changing. [2] N O T E S [1] [The law intended to finish the playpen issue -private deposits in dollars captured by the banking system- by imposing a forcible
The Collapse of Argentina, part 3: Juan Perón
Coming to terms with Juan Perón is necessary for two reasons. Firstly, Perónism remains an important element of Argentine politics today, especially in the labor movement. Secondly, in many ways Hugo Chavez is a Perón-like figure. For Marxists, such figures present a significant challenge. If we are for socialism, what is our attitude toward figures struggling against imperialism but who are not socialists? For some socialists, however, Perón was not in a progressive struggle with imperialism. He is seen as some kind of Bonapartist caudillo at best, or fascist at worst. Before attempting to address the question of what Perón stood for, it is necessary to review the economic problems that faced Argentina prior to his ascendancy. By the early 20th century, Argentina had already become dominated by a coalition of the local ruling classes based on the ranching, grain growing in the pampas; and the import-export and financial sectors in Buenos Aires, which supported the agrarian economy. The city's proximity to the pampas made it the political and commercial hub of the country, just as New York City was for the USA. These local fractions of the bourgeoisie had developed a very close relationship to Great Britain that relied on Argentina for its agricultural exports. The emergence of refrigerated ships ensured that meat could arrive in British seaports without any loss. Prior to this technical innovation, you had to ship livestock that naturally lost weight during the arduous trans-oceanic voyage. While this arrangement made Argentina relatively prosperous and allowed an upsurge of immigration, the economy was ultimately dependent on Great Britain. It also stunted local industrial growth since the relationship with Great Britain implied favoritism toward imported British manufactured goods. Local industry remained somewhat primitive and wage labor tended to be of an unskilled and part-time nature. The Radical Party mounted the first challenge to the entrenched class relationships. Their social base was in the petty proprietors, shopkeepers, intelligentsia, professionals and labor aristocracy of the cities and towns. The leadership, however, came mainly from landed interests that were shut out of the Argentina-England connection. Hipólito Yrigoyen, the Radical who became president in 1916 and again in 1928, was himself a small landowner. Despite the name Radical, the party was incapable of breaking completely with the pre-existing class system. Basically, it sought to extend both geographically and socially the system that had defined Argentina's past. As long as the economy continued to expand, the Radical Party did not pose a threat to the status quo. The dominant ranchers and bankers probably understood that the system needed loosening up for it to survive over the long haul. With such a low level of class struggle in a period of rising economic expectations, it is no wonder that some segments of the labor movement developed reformist illusions. Corradi writes: The undisputed economic hegemony of the landed elite throughout this period of middle-class government is even more clearly revealed by the vicissitudes of the Argentine socialist movement. That movement was born in the 1880's when inflation devoured the incomes of the incipient working class. With the subsequent expansion of Argentine exports, the favorable terms of trade stabilized the currency. Thus, the success of the elite's economic program won for them the support of the socialists, who from then on sought reform and not revolution. Social mobility also contributed to the bourgeois tendencies of the socialists. Eventually they became junior partners of the establishment. These are the historical roots of a spectacle that would puzzle some observers in 1945, when socialists and communists demonstrated against Perón in the company of reactionary landlords. After Yrigoyen's re-election in 1928, things changed radically. With the stock market crash, the prices of meat and grain fell. Consequently, Argentina's gold reserves flowed outward to pay for imported goods. Multiplier effects worsened the economy overall and before long Argentina was in a deep social and economic crisis comparable to the one being suffered today. General discontent provoked the dominant landed and banking sectors to back a military coup against Yrigoyen and on September 6, 1930 General José Felix Uriburu came to power. Despite being thrust into power by the old agrarian ruling class, the military junta was forced willy-nilly to address Argentina's underlying economic weaknesses. This led to the adoption of public works projects of a Keynsian nature. It also forced Argentina to begin a policy of national industrialization based on what is commonly known as import substitution. This policy is associated with the name of Raul Prebisch, an Argentine economist who strongly influenced the dependency
Argentina
[From the BBC] Tuesday, 23 April, 2002, 19:11 GMT 20:11 UK Argentine economy chief quits Argentina's economy minister has quit after less than four months in the post, as concerns grew over Argentina's economic crisis. Jorge Remes Lenicov's resignation followed a decision by Argentine politicians to delay a vote on his last-ditch package for preventing a collapse in the country's banking system. He also failed in meetings to secure loans from the International Monetary Fund to tackle Argentina's grave economic crisis. President Eduardo Duhalde has accepted Mr Remes Lenicov's resignation, an economy ministry spokesman said. The minister's rescue plan proposed allowing Argentine banks to convert about 60% of deposits into government bonds - in effect forcing people to lend money to the government. Economic reforms Protesters had gathered earlier on Tuesday outside the upper house of Argentina's parliament to register their unease at the progress of economic reform. Argentines were told that banks, closed since the weekend, would remain shut until Friday, when Congress was set to have completed its debate of the proposed legal changes. The bank closures were ordered to prevent panic withdrawals by account holders who, rightly, feared that high-level talks to restart aid payments to Argentina would fail. The account holders were also spooked by the rapidly falling value of the country's currency, the peso. The move to close the banks partially succeeded, in that the withdrawals were indeed stopped. But the public mood turned sour when Mr Duhalde promised the International Monetary Fund that he would push ahead with economic and legal reforms and a serious belt-tightening exercise. Thousands of Argentines took to the streets on Monday, raising fears of a return of the kind of unrest which prompted President Fernando de la Rua to resign in December. Reaction Mr Remes Lenicov, a long-time political partner of Mr Duhalde, was welcomed as a low-profile, calm and non-confrontational economy minister following the reign of his flamboyant predecessor, Domingo Cavallo. But Mr Remes Lenicov's decision to allow the continued slide in the peso provoked disquiet. He must realize the devaluation, which was his bright idea, has been an appalling failure, said political analyst James Neilson. Confidence in Mr Remes Lenicov was severely undermined when he returned empty handed from talks with the IMF. And concerns over the deposits-for-bonds swap proved the final straw. It's essentially a reflection of the failure of his bonds plan, said Ben Laidler, Argentine equity strategist at UBS Warburg, who described the resignation as bad news. Whereas the bond plan was going to be really grim for the man on the street, it was generally seen as the orthodox way out of a really nightmarish situation. Rafael Ber, an analyst at Argentine Research said the investor reaction to the resignation would depend much on who was chosen to replace Mr Remes. How the market reacts depends on who it is. If it's Energy Secretary Alieto Guadagni, the market will take it as something positive.
Re: Argentina
Here is one more. Sabri == Police Shield Argentine Congress From Public Fury Tue Apr 23, 1:24 PM ET By Stephen Brown BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Reuters) - Armed police ringed Argentina's Congress Tuesday to protect legislators from public anger at plans to convert their bank deposits into government bonds in a last-ditch effort to save banks from collapse. Mobs taunted and chased Congressional staff late Monday, prompting police to escort frightened senators and deputies from the building. Tuesday, hundreds of police blocked roads near the Congress to keep back protesters who began to gather again, furious at the prospect of their savings being converted into low-interest bonds. We won't accept these bonds under any circumstance. We want our dollars back, said one man rallying a growing crowd of protesters banging pots and pans. Legislators planned to wait until nightfall to debate the unpopular government bill that would convert savings into bonds issued by a state which inspires little confidence, having defaulted on part of its $140 billion of sovereign debt in January after four years of recession. On the second day of a four-day bank holiday imposed to halt the panicky exit of money from the financial system while the law is processed, the misery for ordinary people deprived of access to cash deepened with shopkeepers announcing they were suspending purchases with credit and debit cards until the banks reopen. The suspension is general, not just in gas stations, but in the rest of the shops as well, said Ruben Manusovich, head of the shopkeepers' association Fedecamaras, as merchants do not want to assume the risk of payments with cards issued by the banks. BLACKMAIL Latin America's No. 3 economy was plunged into chaos in early January when it ditched a decade-old one-to-one peg to the U.S. dollar. Despite a freeze on term deposits and limits on cash withdrawals imposed in December, the peso currency has since tumbled to over 3 per dollar while the banks lose tens of millions of pesos in deposits every day. Some judges have ruled the freeze unlawful and ordered savings returned. One judge even had the safe of a bank cut open Monday to return a depositor's money. But will all the banks closed, those with any money left, were forced to comb the streets Monday and Tuesday looking for ATMs to withdraw cash. Some legislators see the protracted bank holiday as a way of forcing them to speed through the drastic legislation Saying the banks will be closed until Congress votes is an unacceptable form of blackmail, said Sen. Juan Carlos Passo of the opposition Radical Party. But President Eduardo Duhalde said Monday the bank holiday and bond swap were the only way to secure minimum financial support from the International Monetary Fund (news - web sites), and told Congress, which made him caretaker president until 2003 amid the January upheaval, that it could remove him if it disagreed. The IMF has conditioned any new aid on Argentina stabilizing the banking system and bringing spendthrift provinces to heel. The reported $5 billion of aid in the pipeline would only be enough to roll over Argentina's IMF debt, but would likely open other channels of aid. The World Bank (news - web sites)'s envoy to Argentina, Myrna Alexander, told a business conference Tuesday she believed Duhalde was trying to give people the chance to get back their savings in the future. BANKS' ROLE Most legislators have agreed to pass the bill, but do not want banks to get away scot-free, offloading depositors on the state via the issue of government bonds. One inescapable condition is that the banks don't evade their responsibilities, said Sen. Marcelo Lopez Arias of Duhalde's Peronist Party. There are two positions: either we take the side of the banks or we take the side of the people, said Peronist deputy Mario Becerra. Meanwhile, foreign banks here blame local authorities for dashing faith in the financial system by declaring a freeze on deposits in December in order to save Argentine-owned banks suffering liquidity problems. Making huge provisions for Argentine operations, foreign banks are not keen to recapitalize them, raising doubts they will stay. British banking giant HSBC said Tuesday it had no plans to pull out of Argentina, but senior executive David Eldon added: We will not be inclined to put any more money into Argentina at this stage. We would like to be in a position to work with the IMF, with the government, with the regulators to see if there are ways in which we can assist. Bankers are about as popular as politicians in a country that has seen daily protests since the peso was devalued, triggering sharp inflation and memories of the 5,000 percent hyperinflation seen here a decade ago. In a country of 36 million people bowed by 20 percent unemployment and 45 percent poverty, the growing desperation was evident. About 1,000 unemployed people marched on the town hall of Duhalde's home town
Re: Argentina
speaking of Argentina, pen-pals may enjoy the recent movie from Argentina, The Nine Queens (in Spanish, with subtitles). It's an interesting film about con artists, including some mild social commentary. One thing is how much Buenos Aires looks like a North American city... JD
Argentina: Crocodile Tears
Sympathy, but no cash Apr 22nd 2002 From The Economist Global Agenda As Argentinas financial crisis continues to deepen, any hopes that new help might soon be forthcoming from the International Monetary Fund have quickly faded. Argentina will have to deliver concrete reforms first CROCODILE tears. That must be how the Argentine government views the messages of sympathy for the countrys economic and financial plight which emerged from a series of meetings in Washington, DC, at the weekend. The Argentine finance minister, Jorge Remes Lenicov, had hoped that the G7 finance ministers and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would provide some hard cash. Instead, he got little more than lunch. Viewed from Buenos Aires, this reluctance to commit new financial support is hard to take. The government of President Eduardo Duhalde inherited a catastrophic collapse of Argentinas economy and its financial system. Latin Americas third-largest economy was forced to default on its huge public debt (the largest sovereign-debt default in history) and to break a decade-old currency peg with the American dollar. The Argentine peso is now worth less than one third of its value of just a few months ago. The economy is in its fourth year of recession and unemployment is at least 20%, possibly much higher. On April 19th, the day before Mr Remess rendezvous with the G7 ministers, the authorities closed all banks indefinitely in a desperate attempt to stop the continuing drain on bank reserves. The banks are unlikely to reopen until emergency legislation has been passed obliging depositors to accept government bonds instead of cash. How can the international community remain unyielding? The sympathy of senior IMF officials and G7 finance ministers appears genuine. There is recognition of the upheaval that Argentina is now experiencing. But there is also frustration that Argentina still seems unable or unwilling to take the action necessary to reform its economy. Without the changes demanded by the IMF in return for further help, both the Fund and its principal rich-country shareholders take the view that any extra cash they stump up would disappear down a black hole. There is relatively little difference in opinion between the IMF and the government in Buenos Aires on what ultimately needs to be done. The argument is about whether reform or new assistance should come first. The Argentine government appears to believe that some of the conditions demanded for the provision of new money are unreasonable and unrealistic. In particular, both the government and the IMF recognise the need to curb overspending by provincial governments, although the Fund insists reform is a precondition of further help. Hanging over the current negotiations is the stinging criticism of many economists: that the IMF should not have bailed out Argentina last August, when it supplied a further $8 billion as part of a deal which should have included reform of public finances. In the event, the package simply postponed Argentinas default and the de-coupling of its currency from the dollara move which economists had said was inevitable. And public finance reform has yet to be tackled effectively. The IMFs relatively new first deputy managing director, Anne Krueger, said recently that even with hindsight it is possible to defend the August decision. And other economists have pointed out that it was particularly in the last quarter of last year, as Argentinas fate became obviousexcept to the then government in Buenos Airesthat the risk premium on the countrys debt started to rise sharply above that for other emerging-market economies. This differentiation of risk played an important part in limiting the fall-out from Argentinas collapse. So far, the contagion that was so apparent in previous emerging-market crises has been noticeably absent in Argentinas case. Whatever the merits of the August bail-out, there now seems to be unanimity that any new package should involve unbreakable commitments from Argentina to undertake reforms. That seems to mean delivering those reforms, or at least making a convincing start to them, up front. This is now something Mr Remes will have to reflect on with President Duhalde. The IMFs managing director, Horst Köhler, said on April 20th that he did not expect further negotiations until the IMF team returns to Buenos Aires next month. The World Bank, meanwhile, is examining the scope for providing humanitarian aid to Argentina to ease the plight of the poorest citizens. And all those involved are trying to draw lessons from the Argentine experience. The G7 has agreed to change the way emerging-market governments issue sovereign debt in order to reduce the risk of default or make them less disruptive. The IMF is working on other far-reaching proposals. IMF economists have also been examining why Latin American countries seem unusually susceptible to disruptive financial crises. One key finding
Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
At 11:17 AM 21/04/2002 +0800, Grant wrote: That wasn't my contention, which is more accurately that except for actual formal/military imperialism, (e.g. Britain in India) imperialist and imperialised have always been poles on a notional axis, rather than being distinct and permanent things. I mean are you saying that there is little difference between the present positions (relative and absolute) of the economies and overseas political influence of Malaysia and Indonesia, compared now with what they were 50 years ago? Nothing is pure or permanent, but yes, Malaysia and Indonesia are still imperialist-dominated countries (and also still in a different way than lesser imperialists Australia and New Zealand). The best recent candidate for the 'imperial' club is probably s. Korea, but, hello, this country is divided in half, occupied by US nukes... Forces which, some would argue, have assisted the South Korean national bourgeoisie in the same way that the capitalist economies of Japan, Taiwan and the old West Germany grew significantly as armed camps. S Korea ... could do _nothing_ if Japan, Europe and the US stopped imports from s. Korea with a stroke of a pen. Why would they do that? And there's always China... For protectionist reasons, like the current US tariffs on s. Korean steel. Korean capitalists are impressive, but they are more vulnerable than capitalists in Japan or Germany. s. Korea and Taiwan were assisted to stop 'communism', but I don't see either of them being let into the imperialist club. It is possible, but a lot of this kind of talk has been cooled by the 'Asian' financial crisis. One point of the stats was that the highly imperialised Kenya is imperialist in regard to neighbouring countries, as shown (e.g.) by the restrictions on Kenyan investment. Nigeria is an even stronger case. Yes, imperialized countries often dominate weaker neighbours, but I think the concept of imperialism should be reserved for geo-politics at a larger scale. And Kenya's outward FDI/GDP is only 1.5%; one-fifth of the inward rate. Nigeria's outward FDI/GDP is an impressive 31%, but still less than inward FDI/GDP at 51%. I mentioned South Africa before, but forgot to include the rates - inward FDI/GDP is 13.4% and outward FDI/GDP 24.8%. We need to look at other criteria, but the FDI numbers suggest that in Africa the only candidate for imperialist status is South Africa. As you can see, Belgium and Switzerland show high rates of outward FDI, and most FDI is to and from Europe - and almost nothing is _from_ the likes of Argentina, Malaysia or Saudi Arabia. I note that the HK and Singaporean outward FDI figures cited are higher than any of the European states you have cited, except Switzerland. Fair enough, but, again, I think 'real' imperialist status requires a bigger real-estate base than these city-states. They are historical/geographical accidents/exceptions who lack the (more) independent economic base characteristic of 'real' imperialists. Bill R. also notes that it is important to consider the extent to which their FDI data reflects investors from other countries (this is probably also very relevant for the Swiss data). Substitute longer term declines in prices for wheat (which in the 1950s was worth more than three times what it is now), beef and other commodities and you have substantial structural problems for Argentina and Australia, both of which (unlike Indonesia or Malaysia) have also both experienced a withering of their manufacturing industries in the last 30 years. The source I cited also reports a decline in the index for Australian coal from 55.9 in 1980 to 32.6 in 1997. However, in general terms the point is that the prices of goods produced by the rich imperialist countries have risen relative to those produced by poor imperialized countries. The Argentina-Australia comparison is very much on point. Have their manufacturing sectors really followed similar paths in recent decades? I don't have the data for Argentina on hand, but the OECD STAN database shows that per capita manufacturing output in Australia in 1997 was over US$8000, and total manufacturing output was over 5 times greater than in 1970, and about 25% greater than in 1989. (current US$). I think this suggests a different kind of 'withering' than in Argentina. There are obviously more non-thieves and fewer thieves in imperialised countries than in imperial ones; we will never stop thievery by encouraging the smaller thieves. It is my fault for having started this inelegant metaphor, so... Bill
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada (Entrepôts)
Bill R: Thanks for a very interesting post and the references, which I haven't had time to check yet. I haven't been able to pinpoint the exact quote, but somewhere in _Capital_ Marx (slightly tongue-in-cheek) quotes Adam Smith saying that all entrepôts are barbaric; Marx's point being that monopolies of foreign trade were the main way in which metropolitan bourgeoisies exploited colonial bourgeoisies. How times change. Regards, Grant. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.351 / Virus Database: 197 - Release Date: 19/04/2002
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada (and US foreign investment)
Charles Brown wrote: Profits aside, two features of FDI which seem to clearly differentiate developed and developing countries (in the context of the US foreign investment thread, imperial vs neo-colonies) appear to be the balance between inward and outward investment stock (biased towards outward for developed countries; overwhelmingly inward for developing CB: Might this be termed export of capital ? It could be expressed as net export of capital, but that would cover up the fact that most capital exports are from one developed country to another. Bill
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Louis: For the foreseeable future, places like Argentina and Venezuela are on the front lines. In places such as these, anti-imperialist consciousness will fuel the proletarian revolution just as it did in Vietnam, Cuba, China and many other countries where victory was not achived. The main advantage held by revolutionaries in Russia in 1917, China in the 1940s, Cuba and Vietnam in the 50s was class consciousness and/or the opposition of weak/unpopular states. What they did not have were the fully developed capitalist economies which would have ensured the long term success of their revolutions. I wouldn't compare what happened in Australia to what happened to Nicaragua, however. Me either. The USA could have lived with a Labor government in Australia. It was on the other hand ready to break laws and risk a constitutional crisis to topple a government that it feared would become another Cuba. You have correctly identified the percieved threat to important US satellite/communications bases (e.g. Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North West Cape) as the main reason why the US state wanted rid of Whitlam. His government was also a direct threat to accumulation by US companies; there were strong left nationalists in his cabinet who were committed to nationalisation of mineral/petroleum ressources owned by US companies. There were other reasons as well, such as Whitlam's embarrassment of Nixon's foreign policy (e.g. unilateral withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam and his criticism of US foreign policy generally.) In a letter to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote: ...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable. In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers' party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals. and the workers gaily share the feast of England's monopoly of the world market and the colonies. What these quotes do not show is that Marx's view, especially at the end of his life, was very long term. English wage labourers in 1858 were --- apart from Australia and other settler societies --- the best paid working class in the world. English workers benefited directly from the economic growth driven by formal/military imperialism and directly from cheap consumer goods produced overseas. These things could hardly lend themselves to revolutionary class consciousness. But the end had to come and it did. No one could say in 2002 that class consciousness or pauperisation is absent in England. Regards, Grant.
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Bill B.: Hong Kong 65.772 Saudi Arabia22.71.3 s. Korea6.1 6.5 Taiwan 7.8 14.7 New Zealand 66.211 Israel 11.16.8 Spain 21.512.5 Austria 11.38.2 Sweden 22.541.3 Belgium 61.750.2 Switzerland 26.569.1 I cited the FDI/GDP ratios against the suggestion that FDI from the likes of Malaysia and Indonesia is dissolving the cardinal difference between imperialist and imperialized countries. That wasn't my contention, which is more accurately that except for actual formal/military imperialism, (e.g. Britain in India) imperialist and imperialised have always been poles on a notional axis, rather than being distinct and permanent things. I mean are you saying that there is little difference between the present positions (relative and absolute) of the economies and overseas political influence of Malaysia and Indonesia, compared now with what they were 50 years ago? HK and Singapore are entrepots, and they are city-economies, which indicates the need to qualify the significance of their numbers It seems to me that if no western state is very similar --- and I'm not convinced this is the case --- to HK and Singapore it would have a lot to do with the latter being extremely small, densely populated city states and therefore more focused on foreign trade. The best recent candidate for the 'imperial' club is probably s. Korea, but, hello, this country is divided in half, occupied by US nukes... Forces which, some would argue, have assisted the South Korean national bourgeoisie in the same way that the capitalist economies of Japan, Taiwan and the old West Germany grew significantly as armed camps. S Korea ... could do _nothing_ if Japan, Europe and the US stopped imports from s. Korea with a stroke of a pen. Why would they do that? And there's always China... I think the difference between presenting a NZ passport and a Malaysian passport helps clarify the social relationships in world imperialism. That would depend on where they travelled to I think. Don't know what you mean with the Kenya stats, but there is _zero_ danger of Kenya going imperialist in any serious use of the term. One point of the stats was that the highly imperialised Kenya is imperialist in regard to neighbouring countries, as shown (e.g.) by the restrictions on Kenyan investment. Nigeria is an even stronger case. As you can see, Belgium and Switzerland show high rates of outward FDI, and most FDI is to and from Europe - and almost nothing is _from_ the likes of Argentina, Malaysia or Saudi Arabia. I note that the HK and Singaporean outward FDI figures cited are higher than any of the European states you have cited, except Switzerland. Trade/GDP in Austria is 44% and 38% in Switzerland, again, most trade is with fellow imperialist countries, not semi-colonial countries. They enjoy 'free' trade, not the imperialist protectionism and unequal exchange faced by Malaysia or Indonesia. The price index for their manufactured goods _rose_ from 72 in 1980 to 108 in 1997, while logs from Malaysia dropped from 272 to 221, Indonesia's coffee producers faced a coffee index decline from 450.4 to 161.2 !!! The index for cotton fell from 284.3 to 162.2 and for rubber from 197.9 to 94.5 (indexes from World Bank, World Development Indicators). Yes, these are striking downturns. Substitute longer term declines in prices for wheat (which in the 1950s was worth more than three times what it is now), beef and other commodities and you have substantial structural problems for Argentina and Australia, both of which (unlike Indonesia or Malaysia) have also both experienced a withering of their manufacturing industries in the last 30 years. If we can't distinguish between a big thief taking from a smaller thief and theft from non-thieves we will never stop thievery. There are obviously more non-thieves and fewer thieves in imperialised countries than in imperial ones; we will never stop thievery by encouraging the smaller thieves. Regards, Grant.
Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Grant Lee wrote: HK and Singapore are entrepots, and they are city-economies, which indicates the need to qualify the significance of their numbers It seems to me that if no western state is very similar --- and I'm not convinced this is the case --- to HK and Singapore it would have a lot to do with the latter being extremely small, densely populated city states and therefore more focused on foreign trade. The international stats (e.g. World Bank, WTO) seem to highlight only Singapore and Hong Kong as being major re-exporters. This is presumably due to historical, colonial and geographical factors as much as their size. If you want a fascinating glimpse into how it works in Hong Kong (the tolling operations, rundown of manufacturing, use by transnationals etc) have a look at Intermediaries in Entrepôt Trade: Hong Kong Re-Exports of Chinese Goods, by Robert C. Feenstra Department of Economics, University of California, Davis and National Bureau of Economic Research, and Gordon H. Hanson, Department of Economics and School of Business Administration, University of Michigan and NBER, December 2000. Also published as NBER paper W8088. It's on both Hanson's (http://webuser.bus.umich.edu/gohanson/gohanson.html#WorkingPapers) and the NBER web sites. I wrote up some of this when looking at the consequences for New Zealand of a FTA with HK (currently under negotiation but faltering) - see http://canterbury.cyberplace.org.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Trade/GlobalisationByStealth.pdf The best recent candidate for the 'imperial' club is probably s. Korea, but, hello, this country is divided in half, occupied by US nukes... Forces which, some would argue, have assisted the South Korean national bourgeoisie in the same way that the capitalist economies of Japan, Taiwan and the old West Germany grew significantly as armed camps. Though what is happening to the S Korean national bourgeoisie post-1997 financial crisis, with many of the most powerful corporations being wound up or sold to European and US TNCs? I think the difference between presenting a NZ passport and a Malaysian passport helps clarify the social relationships in world imperialism. That would depend on where they travelled to I think. What do social relationships mean when discussing imperialism? New Zealand (along with Australia) takes an imperialist position in the South Pacific, where it is a relatively big fish amongst tiny ones. But that is hardly a fertile source of resources: New Zealand's income and living standards would barely change if that role disappeared. New Zealand's main role is as a footman to the imperialists, and its role in the S Pacific reflects that - carrying the good words of neoliberalism to the governments there, acting as policeman when needs be. But as footman, it mainly gets crumbs from the imperial table in terms of trade access and dependence on their capital. Australia has a stronger imperial role (especially north of it in PNG, E Timor, etc) but in reality is not much different in the pecking order to New Zealand. I note that the HK and Singaporean outward FDI figures cited are higher than any of the European states you have cited, except Switzerland. Again, I suspect a large part of their outward FDI is in fact from branches of companies from other countries. In Hong Kong's case that is esp mainland China, but also all the usual suspects. I looked at that in New Zealand's case: In 12 of the 72 cases I listed from statutory approvals over the last decade, no genuine Hong Kong investment was involved, and an additional five included Hong Kong investors among third country investors. Countries represented whose investors were using Hong Kong as a base to invest in New Zealand (in addition to investors from Hong Kong itself) include Australia, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Monaco, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, the U.K., and the U.S.A. In addition, in two instances, New Zealand investors were using Hong Kong companies to invest here. In addition, a large part of HK businesses' time seems to be spent circulating their capital through tax havens (see the info I gave in my previous post). Even 15-16% corporate tax rates still provide incentives for tax avoidance apparently. But that certainly does not mean all, or even the majority of their outward FDI is sourced elsewhere - both HK and Singapore (in that case, often the Singapore government) now have very strong national capital. Bill
Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada (and US foreign investment)
Ratios of inward and outward FDI stock to GDP, and FDI flows to gross fixed capital formation are tabulated for most countries in the various World Investment Reports of UNCTAD. They also calculate a transnationality index of FDI host countries, which averages the four shares: FDI flows (as a percentage of GFCF), FDI inward stocks as a percentage of GDP, value added of foreign affiliates as a percentage of GDP, and employment of foreign affiliates as a precentage of total employment. The developed countries which the 2000 report tabulates (with New Zealand at the top!) average around 13%, and the tabulated developing countries 14%. Unfortunately they don't seem interested in tabulating profits! It's difficult to say what profit figures would show. The ability of TNCs to transfer their profits from one country another for tax, political or internal reasons must make the profit attributed to their operations in any one country arbitrary to a degree. Even without deliberate transfer pricing, it is conceivable that (say) Nike would put up with lower rates of profit in Indonesia because the manufacture of its shoes is such a small part of the cost. Most of the profits may well be made elsewhere in the chain of distribution and sale. I'm not saying that it necessarily happens like that, but it is quite conceivable. To say TNCs chase cheap labour is to oversimplify. Certainly that is an important part of their motivation, but since around 76% of FDI was to developed countries (in 1999) - and 90% of mergers and acquisitions - it isn't the whole story. Other motivations include domination of their selected markets, increasing scale for competitive reasons, and security of investment. Profits aside, two features of FDI which seem to clearly differentiate developed and developing countries (in the context of the US foreign investment thread, imperial vs neo-colonies) appear to be the balance between inward and outward investment stock (biased towards outward for developed countries; overwhelmingly inward for developing); and greenfield vs mergers/acquisition investment (over 80% of FDI was MAs for all countries in 1999; but about one third of FDI to developing countries). Grant Lee remarks below that Singapore's inward FDI is still well above outward FDI in this city-state where annual trade is also 160% !!! of GDP. Singapore has unusually high FDI, but its high level of trade is no mystery. Like Hong Kong, it has a huge entrepot function, with high levels of re-exports - importing for the purpose of re-exporting with little or no work done on the goods on the way through. In 1999 Hong Kong (popn about 6 million) had the world's 10th largest international trading volume (mainland China was 9th). In 2000 88.5% of its exports were re-exports, a third of these to mainland China. Its foreign investment is even more remarkable (and statistics-distorting!): with the exceptions of China and its former colonial master, the U.K., the top-ranked sources and destinations of Hong Kong investment are the tax havens of the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda (1998 figures). The ownership of this investment is certainly elsewhere, including the U.S., Europe, Hong Kong itself, and China. Bill Grant Lee wrote: Bill Burgess [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: country inward FDI stock/GDPoutward FDI stock/GDP Canada 23.9% 26.9% Australia 28.117.1 UK 23.335.9 France 11.715.9 Singapore 85.856.1 Malaysia67.022.7 Indonesia 73.32.4 Argentina 13.95.4 Brazil 17.11.4 Interesting figures. I haven't had time to look at the comparable figures for other countries. In any case they don't prove a permanent/structural exclusion from imperial activity. For example, what about Hong Kong (pre-1997, not that it is yet a homogenous part of China)? The last I heard there was hardly any manufacturing left in Hong Kong because proprietors had shifted operations to the mainland. South Africa? Saudi Arabia? Note the obvious difference in rates of outward FDI, plus the fact that most FDI by Canada, France, etc. is in other imperialist countries while most FDI by Indonesia, Argentina, etc. is in fellow semi-colonies. Every bourgeoisie has to start somewhere. For example --- and I'm not going to revisit the complexities and vitriol of the Kenya Debate --- but I just came across this on the web: Andrea Goldstein and Njuguna S. Ndung'u, OECD Development Centre Technical Paper No. 171: New Forms Of Co-Operation And Integration In Emerging Africa Regional Integration Experience, March 2001. quote: (p. 16) Table 5. Import Sources (1997)* (From)Kenya Tanzania Uganda (To)Kenya-0
Re: Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada (and US foreign investment)
On Sat, 20 Apr 2002 00:37:28 +1200, Bill Rosenberg wrote: It's difficult to say what profit figures would show. The ability of TNCs to transfer their profits from one country another for tax, political or internal reasons must make the profit attributed to their operations in any one country arbitrary to a degree. It is absolutely necessary to dispense with the idea that imperialism is identical to multinationals seeking out countries where labor is cheap and profits are high. Imperialism is operative even when there is not a single US corporation or subsidiary on foreign soil. Take the petroleum industry, for example, an essential piece in the jigsaw puzzle of imperialism. Saudi Arabian and Venezuelan oil wells are owned by the government, but are forced to deal with Anglo-American corporations that market the finished product. With pliant governments, the US can continue to bleed these countries dry even if it is not operating on foreign soil. This is also true of agro-export. For example, Colombia capitalists own all of the plantations but are forced to deal with much bigger and more powerful US marketing operations that buy and process the raw beans. In general, third world cartels for products like coffee beans, etc. are at a much bigger disadvantage than oil exporters, who can at least cause shocks to the world system if they cut back on production. Higher coffee prices might cause grumbling at Starbucks, but they won't bring the advanced countries' economy crashing down. Finally, many maquilas are typically not owned directly by US corporations or subsidiaries. Nike would prefer to line up local subcontractors who it can then blame for abuses to the work-force. This, of course, is not to say that North American auto production in places like Mexico is driven by the need to compete with Korea and Japan. There is a drive to the bottom. However, to fully understand the operations of imperialism, you have to look at the full constellation of class relations not just multinational behavior. -- Louis Proyect, [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 04/19/2002 Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
LP: But I wouldn't compare what happened in Australia to what happened to Nicaragua, however. The USA could have lived with a Labor government in Australia. It was on the other hand ready to break laws and risk a constitutional crisis to topple a government that it feared would become another Cuba. US policies toward New Zealand came damn close when NZ objected to US ships not confirming whether or not they carried nukes in NZ waters and harbors. In the case of Australia, the US has taken the place of GB as key 'military ally' and you could argue the post-war US-Australia relationship has become neo-imperial. I found it interesting that a US firm so closely linked to the US imperium should be operating the immigrant prisoner camps in Australia. But then again, it was also interesting that this security firm got sold to a Danish company (which I know nothing about, though). Charles Jannuzi
Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
On Fri, 19 Apr 2002 22:46:00 +0900, Charles Jannuzi wrote: US policies toward New Zealand came damn close when NZ objected to US ships not confirming whether or not they carried nukes in NZ waters and harbors. In the case of Australia, the US has taken the place of GB as key 'military ally' and you could argue the post-war US- Australia relationship has become neo-imperial. Perhaps we have a different definition of imperialism. I don't regard US bullying and imperialism as the same thing. Switzerland and Sweden have never bullied anybody in recent years, but they are imperialist powers. US imperialism rules the roost, but it has junior partners including Australia and New Zealand. One of the unfortunate consequences of the humanitarian intervention in East Timor is that it has legitimized the imperial ambitions of the Oceania powers. -- Louis Proyect, [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 04/19/2002 Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
The CIA in Australia, Part 1 ... and individuals in Australia. Today, in part 1 ... operations against the Whitlam government through the ... for covert actions. Covert Action often means the ... http://www.serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/cia_oz/cia_oz1.htm - 24k - Cached - Similar pages The CIA in Australia, Part 2 ... was involved in covert activities against the ... industrial upheaval in Australia leading virtually to ... centre of the action was Whitlam Cabinet Minister Clyde ... http://www.serendipity.magnet.ch/cia/cia_oz/cia_oz2.htm http://www.pir.org/main2/Gough_Whitlam.html WHITLAM GOUGH Australia 1972-1984 Agee,P. On the Run. 1987 (197) Blum,W. The CIA: A Forgotten History. 1986 (278-83) Canadian Covert Activity Analyst 1984-W (9) Christic Institute. Sheehan Affidavit. 1988-03-25 (36-8) Corn,D. Blond Ghost. 1994 (303-7) CounterSpy 1982-01 (54) CounterSpy 1982-08 (4) CounterSpy 1984-02 (46-8) Covert Action Information Bulletin 1982-#16 (53) Covert Action Information Bulletin 1987-#28 (7) Freney,D. Get Gough! 1985 (54-62) Intelligence/Parapolitics (Paris) 1984-06 (4-6) Jeffreys-Jones,R. The CIA and American Democracy. 1989 (206-7) Kwitny,J. The Crimes of Patriots. 1987 (16, 127-42) Leigh,D. The Wilson Plot. 1988 (xii, 230, 232-3) Lernoux,P. In Banks We Trust. 1984 (72) Mother Jones 1984-03 (14-20, 44-5, 52) Parapolitics/USA 1982-03-31 (14) Seagrave,S. The Marcos Dynasty. 1988 (370-1) Stich,R. Russell,T.C. Disavow: A CIA Saga of Betrayal. 1995 (93-4) Texas Observer 1991-09-20 (11-4) Thomas,K. Keith,J. The Octopus. 1996 (42, 90-1) Wall Street Journal 1982-08-24 (22) Washington Post 1985-01-01 (A20) pages cited this search: 83 Order hard copy of these pages Show a social network diagram for this name The names below are mentioned on the listed pages with the name WHITLAM GOUGH Click on a name for a new proximity search: ANGLETON JAMES JESUS Blum,W. The CIA: A Forgotten History. 1986 (279) Freney,D. Get Gough! 1985 (55-57) Intelligence/Parapolitics (Paris) 1984-06 (6) Jeffreys-Jones,R. The CIA and American Democracy. 1989 (207) Kwitny,J. The Crimes of Patriots. 1987 (132-133) Mother Jones 1984-03 (14 16 19) Parapolitics/USA 1982-03-31 (14) ANTHONY J DOUGLAS Blum,W. The CIA: A Forgotten History. 1986 (280) Christic Institute. Sheehan Affidavit. 1988-03-25 (37) Corn,D. Blond Ghost. 1994 (303) CounterSpy 1982-01 (54) Intelligence/Parapolitics (Paris) 1984-06 (4 6) Kwitny,J. The Crimes of Patriots. 1987 (135) Mother Jones 1984-03 (20) Texas Observer 1991-09-20 (13) API DISTRIBUTORS INC Stich,R. Russell,T.C. Disavow: A CIA Saga of Betrayal. 1995 (94) ASIA FOUNDATION Blum,W. The CIA: A Forgotten History. 1986 (283) Intelligence/Parapolitics (Paris) 1984-06 (4) ASKIN ROBERT Parapolitics/USA 1982-03-31 (14) ASTON JOHN Wall Street Journal 1982-08-24 (22) AUSTRALIAN SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE Corn,D. Blond Ghost. 1994 (303-304) Leigh,D. The Wilson Plot. 1988 (232-233) AUSTRALIA CIA IN Blum,W. The CIA: A Forgotten History. 1986 (278-283) Canadian Covert Activity Analyst 1984-W (9) CounterSpy 1982-01 (54) CounterSpy 1982-08 (4) CounterSpy 1984-02 (46-48) Intelligence/Parapolitics (Paris) 1984-06 (4-6) Kwitny,J. The Crimes of Patriots. 1987 (127-142) Mother Jones 1984-03 (20 44-45 52) Parapolitics/USA 1982-03-31 (14) BARBOUR PETER Freney,D. Get Gough! 1985 (55) Leigh,D. The Wilson Plot. 1988 (232) Mother Jones 1984-03 (15-16) BARNETT HARVEY CounterSpy 1984-02 (48) BEAZLEY DONALD E Stich,R. Russell,T.C. Disavow: A CIA Saga of Betrayal. 1995 (94) BLACK EDWIN F (GEN) Thomas,K. Keith,J. The Octopus. 1996 (91) Wall Street Journal 1982-08-24 (22) BOYCE CHRISTOPHER JOHN Blum,W. The CIA: A Forgotten History. 1986 (283) Corn,D. Blond Ghost. 1994 (305-307) Covert Action Information Bulletin 1982-#16 (53) Intelligence/Parapolitics (Paris) 1984-06 (4) Kwitny,J. The Crimes of Patriots. 1987 (130-131) BRANDT WILLY Leigh,D. The Wilson Plot. 1988 (230 232) BROWN COLIN (ASIO) Kwitny,J. The Crimes of Patriots. 1987 (129) BRUNN HERBERT THEODORE Texas Observer 1991-09-20 (14) BUSH GEORGE W Texas Observer 1991-09-20 (11) BUSINESS INTERNATIONAL CounterSpy 1984-02 (46) CAIRNS JIM Intelligence/Parapolitics (Paris) 1984-06 (6) Kwitny,J. The Crimes of Patriots. 1987 (134) CAMERON CLYDE Leigh,D. The Wilson Plot. 1988 (232) CANADA CIA IN Canadian Covert Activity Analyst 1984-W (9) CARROLL ALAN CounterSpy 1984-02 (46) CARTER LEO Wall Street Journal 1982-08-24 (22) CHAVEZ RICARDO Christic Institute. Sheehan Affidavit. 1988-03-25 (38) CITY NATIONAL BANK (MIAMI) Stich,R. Russell,T.C. Disavow: A CIA Saga of Betrayal. 1995 (94) CLINE RAY STEINER Corn,D. Blond Ghost. 1994 (306-307) Covert Action Information Bulletin 1982-#16 (53) Kwitny,J. The Crimes of Patriots. 1987 (133-134) Thomas,K. Keith,J. The Octopus. 1996 (90) COCKE ERLE JR Wall Street Journal 1982-08-24 (22) COLBY WILLIAM EGAN Covert Action Information Bulletin 1982-#16 (53) Freney,D. Get Gough! 1985 (56-57) Texas
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
LP: Perhaps we have a different definition of imperialism. I don't regard US bullying and imperialism as the same thing. Switzerland and Sweden have never bullied anybody in recent years, but they are imperialist powers. US imperialism rules the roost, but it has junior partners including Australia and New Zealand. One of the unfortunate consequences of the humanitarian intervention in East Timor is that it has legitimized the imperial ambitions of the Oceania powers. -- Louis Proyect, [EMAIL PROTECTED] on I guess my point was that exploiter can easily become the exploited when the US involved. As any US citizen should know. C. Jannuzi
Re: Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
April 5, 1998 THE SWISS, THE GOLD, AND THE DEAD By Jean Ziegler. Translated by John Brownjohn. 322 pp. New York: Harcourt Brace Company. $27. (Review) Gnomes and Nazis An account of Switzerland's role in financing Germany's war machine. By PETER GROSE (Peter Grose, a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is the biographer of Allen Dulles. He is completing a book on covert action in East Europe during the cold war.) The day of reckoning for mighty Switzerland has been long in coming. In the manner of a post-modern Zola, an angry man of letters, Jean Ziegler, has thrown down his J'accuse with The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead, and brigades of auditors, financiers, factors, historians, lawyers and publicists are trying to cope with it. During the cold war, successive Swiss generations wrote off the ambiguities of the World War II era as the time-honored way of neutrality. The enormous self- enrichment that grew from the financing of Hitler's war machine came, it was always said, through Switzerland's normal banking acumen. The disappearance into Swiss public and private coffers of assets seized by the Nazis from Jews and other victims was beneath polite discussion. For half a century, Switzerland lived as a nation in denial. But the country has been set aflame by this modest volume, published last year by a petulant professor of sociology at Geneva University, a longtime Member of Parliament and a socialist, too left wing for the bankers' tastes yet Swiss through and through. Readers of English can now savor his polemic for themselves (in a fine translation from the German by John Brownjohn). The awesome, world-encompassing financial power wielded today by the major Swiss banks is founded on wartime profits, Ziegler writes. And, he says, the Swiss public, those who benefited directly or indirectly from these profits, accept this outcome with pride and an absolutely clear conscience. Ziegler's fundamental aim is one that no board of auditors would presume to undertake: to analyze sociological factors and human behavior, complicities and constraints. His is a book about the Swiss people, his own countrymen, a nation of guilty innocents and innocent guilty, consumed in a mania for self-righteousness, guiltlessness and perpetual purity. What never fails to fascinate me about Swiss business tycoons, industrial magnates and bankers is their combination of great professional ability and infinite political naivete, Ziegler declares. We Swiss are 'available,' as Bernese political jargon still calls it. We have no political opinions, we merely offer our services. Ziegler is no stranger to the Swiss banking community. His scholarly works over three decades have dwelt on capitalist exploitation in the third world. More than 20 years ago, he turned his acerbic scrutiny inward, to lift the story of his own society out from under the stifling and alienating blanket of fog which is produced by the ruling discourse and produces the silence and uniformity of consent. This first tentative foray was published in 1976, but attracted little notice in or out of Switzerland; an English edition entitled Switzerland Exposed found no American publisher. But in the changed mood of 1997 Ziegler's latest broadside has provoked anguish among the Swiss. At best they are astonished; more often they are outraged. Geneva television held a three-hour town meeting on the issues raised by Ziegler's book; the studio audience jeered its author and applauded his critics. The Foreign Minister instructed all our embassies to persuade 'friendly' journalists to denigrate the book in the foreign press, Ziegler writes in an afterword for this American edition. He also reports on a long-scheduled parliamentary debate about dormant Jewish bank accounts that was canceled in September 1996, a few moments before it was to start. The presiding officer seems puzzled by my indignation, says Ziegler, one of those listed to speak in the debate. His rosy face registers profound surprise, his response strikes a reproachful note: 'You surely don't want us to make an exhibition of ourselves in front of all these foreigners?' The press galleries were indeed crowded with American, French, British and German correspondents; the Ambassadors from Israel and the United States were settled in the diplomatic gallery. They were incredulous as word spread of the cancellation. The issues that have to be aired have mounted far beyond the capacity of any single debate or author. Even as Ziegler was writing his book, the British Foreign Office put out a hastily assembled review of evidence from its official archives. In May 1997 the United States weighed in with a more thorough investigation led by Stuart Eizenstat, then an Under Secretary of Commerce; disputing Eizenstat's conclusions (which largely coincided with Ziegler's), the Swiss Government nonetheless declared the research factual
BATA SHOES (stems from Argentina, Australia and Canada)
Louis P. pointed out that shoe production in SE Asia for western companies is often done through subcontractors. Bata Shoes has production and retail worldwide and it tries to sell shoes locally based on the income of the avg. worker so as to keep the shoes affordable. Everytime I go to Malaysia I pick up a pair of Bata sandals for use back in Japan (where no one sells Bata). Interestingly Bata is consistently rated a better company than Nike or Reebok or Adidas, but it becomes most exploitative when it is producing for such companies as those. --- http://www.nikeworkers.org/reebok/compare.html How does Reebok add up? 1. How does Reebok compare with other MNCs or footwear companies? Since Reebok contracts out all shoe-making operations, the treatment of the workers by the contractors is pretty much the same, whether it is Nike, Reebok, adidas or Fila. It is a model based on the lowest wage/least rights formula that concentrated almost all shoe production in Indonesia, China and (later) Vietnam. Another model -- NOT contracting out -- offers a different result. Bata (based in Toronto) runs its own factories which produce cheap sneakers for local markets. Ten years ago, the Bata factory in Jakarta had already had a union contract for eighteen years and was paying triple the minimum wage. Ironically, when Bata started to produce expensive shoes for export (for Reebok and others) around 1993, a two-tier system developed and workers making expensive shoes for export were treated as contract (temporary) workers with far inferior conditions and lower wages. Still, a 1999 survey done with the Urban Community Mission showed that there was less abusive treatment in the 2 Bata factories, compared to the factories producing exclusively for export. See full report of interviews with 4,000 Indonesian workers: Click here to find out more There is another mixed model, represented by companies such as U.S.-based New Balance and Saucony (Hyde Athletic). While both companies produce mostly in China, a significant amount of production takes place in the U.S. This means that some sports shoe workers earn more in two hours than Indonesians can earn in a forty-hour week! (Converse also continued to make some sport shoes in the U.S., until mid-2001.) 2. How does the cost/profit of a pair of Reeboks break down? Relation labour costs/publicity? Though the sports shoe business is highly competitive, profits are quite good. It must be remembered that profits are taken by the contractor that makes the shoes, by Reebok and by the retailer. The contractors that produce for Reebok (mostly Taiwanese and Korean companies) have been very successful for the past twenty to twenty-five years -- especially since the production moved to China and Indonesia around 1987. Several years ago, the investment giant Goldman Sachs bought a huge stake in Yue Yuen (one of these contractors), giving an indication of profitability. These profits are derived from a selling cost of around eight dollars (the labor cost being just about one dollar). Last year, a Wall Street Journal article quoted a Yue Yuen manager asking NOT to be quoted saying that Yue Yuen's profits were better than the buyers' (Reebok or Nike) profits. Next, profits are taken by Reebok. Gross margin before taxes is pretty standard at 9%. The spending aimed at increasing sales -- the marketing costs of shoe companies -- has been estimated at about ten percent of final sales price, by Professor Robert J. Ross at Clark University. This is more than TEN times what companies such as Wal-Mart spend on marketing and promotion, Prof. Ross says. In addition, Reebok was severely criticized by the pension fund managers for California's public employees (Calpers) for the ridiculously high salary paid to CEO, Paul Fireman during most of the 90s. The standard practice of retailers such as FootLocker is to mark up the shoes 100% over what it pays to Reebok. That is, a $50 pair of shoes will sell for $100. If it does not sell for full retail, it is discounted, of course. During the sneaker industry's boom years (1992- 97), FootLocker expanded rapidly, going from 2,000 shops to something like 7,000. 3. Who buys Reeboks, where and why? What alternatives are there to buying Reeboks? Currently, Reebok sells about 15% of the sports shoes sold in the world ・ about the same as adidas. Nike has well over 40% of the world-wide market. Reebok had its greatest success with an aerobics shoe for women in the late 1980s ・for a short time, the company was ahead of Nike. Since that time, performance has been pretty dismal. Last year, a Boston Globe columnist called Fireman the worst CEO in America, in a column which reviewed the company's performance over the past decade. Reebok sales are strong in the U.S. and W. Europe; the demographic skews slightly older than Nike痴. Alternatives for running shoes: the U.S. magazine, Consumer Reports rated some New Balance and Saucony shoes above Reebok and
Argentina, Australia and Canada (and US foreign investment)
Argentina, Australia and Canada (and US foreign investment) by Bill Rosenberg -clip- Nice synthesis of these threads, Bill. Profits aside, two features of FDI which seem to clearly differentiate developed and developing countries (in the context of the US foreign investment thread, imperial vs neo-colonies) appear to be the balance between inward and outward investment stock (biased towards outward for developed countries; overwhelmingly inward for developing CB: Might this be termed export of capital ?
Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Grant wrote: country inward FDI stock/GDPoutward FDI stock/GDP Canada 23.9% 26.9% Australia 28.117.1 UK 23.335.9 France 11.715.9 Singapore 85.856.1 Malaysia67.022.7 Indonesia 73.32.4 Argentina 13.95.4 Brazil 17.11.4 Interesting figures. I haven't had time to look at the comparable figures for other countries. In any case they don't prove a permanent/structural exclusion from imperial activity. For example, what about Hong Kong (pre-1997, not that it is yet a homogenous part of China)? The last I heard there was hardly any manufacturing left in Hong Kong because proprietors had shifted operations to the mainland. South Africa? Saudi Arabia? Hong Kong 65.772 Saudi Arabia22.71.3 s. Korea6.1 6.5 Taiwan 7.8 14.7 New Zealand 66.211 Israel 11.16.8 Spain 21.512.5 Austria 11.38.2 Sweden 22.541.3 Belgium 61.750.2 Switzerland 26.569.1 I cited the FDI/GDP ratios against the suggestion that FDI from the likes of Malaysia and Indonesia is dissolving the cardinal difference between imperialist and imperialized countries. I don't see any real shift in the last 75 years or so in this division. Hong Kong has 'moved up' a couple of rungs on the product ladder, and a large part of the 'outward' FDI above is the labour-intensive factories that were opened nearby in the (rest of) PR China. But it lacks other characteristics, e.g. trade/GDP in Hong Kong is 135% - as Bill R. noted, emphasized, HK and Singapore are entrepots, and they are city-economies, which indicates the need to qualify the significance of their numbers (Malaysia has the third highest trade/GDP; these three are the only countries with annual trade greater than GDP). The best recent candidate for the 'imperial' club is probably s. Korea, but, hello, this country is divided in half, occupied by US nukes, and could do _nothing_ if Japan, Europe and the US stopped imports from s. Korea with a stroke of a pen. The balance of inward-outward FDI in Saudi Arabia tells the same story as we know about other realities of foreign-dominated oil producers. I'd be interested in more rounded characterizations of South Africa, but the FDI data is consistent with the 'white'-settler state-now-lesser imperialist status of New Zealand, Israel, etc. Bill R. and I have discussed the NZ FDI stats before; I still have a hard time accepting the 66.2% inward rate in NZ as one that provides a realistic comparison to that in other countries, but in any case, I think the difference between presenting a NZ passport and a Malaysian passport helps clarify the social relationships in world imperialism. Every bourgeoisie has to start somewhere. For example --- and I'm not going to revisit the complexities and vitriol of the Kenya Debate --- but I just came across this on the web: Don't know what you mean with the Kenya stats, but there is _zero_ danger of Kenya going imperialist in any serious use of the term. Singapore's inward and outward rates are both high, but note that inward FDI is still well above outward FDI in this city-state where annual trade is also 160% !!! of GDP. That trend is not unusual for countries with small populations and highly developed economies. What are the comparative figures for Belgium and Switzerland? As you can see, Belgium and Switzerland show high rates of outward FDI, and most FDI is to and from Europe - and almost nothing is _from_ the likes of Argentina, Malaysia or Saudi Arabia. Trade/GDP in Austria is 44% and 38% in Switzerland, again, most trade is with fellow imperialist countries, not semi-colonial countries. They enjoy 'free' trade, not the imperialist protectionism and unequal exchange faced by Malaysia or Indonesia. The price index for their manufactured goods _rose_ from 72 in 1980 to 108 in 1997, while logs from Malaysia dropped from 272 to 221, Indonesia's coffee producers faced a coffee index decline from 450.4 to 161.2 !!! The index for cotton fell from 284.3 to 162.2 and for rubber from 197.9 to 94.5 (indexes from World Bank, World Development Indicators). C. Jannuzi wrote: I guess my point was that exploiter can easily become the exploited when the US involved. As any US citizen should know. If we can't distinguish between a big thief taking from a smaller thief and theft from non-thieves we will never stop thievery. Bill Burgess
Argentina
Top Financial News 04/19 19:44 Argentina Closes Banks Indefinitely to Block Deposits (Update4) By David Plumb Buenos Aires, April 19 (Bloomberg) -- Argentina closed banks indefinitely in an effort to block a rising outflow of deposits. Central Bank Vice President Aldo Pignanelli told the Argentine Banks Association that banks would remain shut until Congress approved legislation halting withdrawals, according to a copy of an internal association memo obtained by Bloomberg News. A central bank spokeswoman declined to comment beyond confirming that banks had been closed. Argentines have withdrawn as much as 350 million pesos ($111 million) a day this week, in part by obtaining court injunctions against the government's freeze on accounts, economists estimate. The withdrawals threaten to bring down the financial system, the government has said. ``Banks have melted down from lack of confidence among the population,'' said Andrew Cummins, chief investment officer of Explorador Capital Group, with $45 million under management in Latin America. ``President Eduardo Duhalde doesn't seem to be able to articulate a plan that can generate confidence.'' Argentina froze deposits in December in an effort to prevent a collapse of the banking system as savers rushed to pull funds, anticipating the government's $95 billion debt default and currency devaluation. Several banks have already run out of cash needed to repay deposits, including Scotiabank Quilmes SA, a unit of Canada's Bank of Nova Scotia. The central bank late last night closed Scotiabank Quilmes for 30 days a week after it shut down another bank. Total Deposits Total deposits have dropped 11 percent to 71 billion pesos this year even as the government imposed withdrawal restrictions, said Standard Poor's analyst Gabriel Caracciolo. Financial institutions have obtained central bank loans to fund a portion of the withdrawals and overcome the cash shortfall. ``No rational person would entrust his money to the banking system at this point, just as no-one trusts the peso,'' said Scott Grannis, chief economist at Western Asset Management Co., with helps manage $1.5 billion in emerging market debt at Western Asset Management Co., with $1.1 billion in emerging market debt. The bank holiday follows two shut downs earlier this year to implement a currency devaluation. Congress expects to receive a bill from Duhalde on Monday that would convert blocked deposits into government bonds and halt further withdrawals, said Jorge Matzkin, president of the lower house's budget committee. Legislators may approve the proposal by as early as Wednesday, he said. Great Depression Franklin D. Roosevelt took a similar step in the U.S. to halt a banking panic during the Great Depression. On March 4, 1933, the day after taking the oath of office, he declared an indefinite banking ``holiday'' until Congress passed legislation giving him emergency powers over financial institutions. The bill was passed and the following week the healthiest banks were allowed to reopen while weaker banks were shuttered. The deposit drain has increased pressure on the peso as Argentines buy dollars with local currency. The peso weakened 3.9 percent to 3.12 per dollar and has lost over two-thirds of its value this year. Argentine officials have said they are concerned that printing more pesos to help banks meet withdrawal demands will lead to a deeper devaluation and inflation. Argentina has already issued 3.3 billion pesos this year, 94 percent of its yearly target. Economy Minister Jorge Remes Lenicov and Central Bank President Mario Blejer arrived in Washington D.C. today for the International Monetary Fund's spring meeting, where they hope to convince the fund and U.S. officials the country can meet conditions for new loans. Remes Lenicov has scheduled some 19 meetings over three days, including with U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice today. Remes declined to make comments to reporters after his meeting with O'Neill.
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Louis Proyect writes: there are degrees. Japan isn't going to become a neo-colony in the near future, but it's clear that US-based companies use their clout to push for opening the Japanese economy to freer flow of capital, etc., so that US companies can buy Japanese assets, etc., at advantageous terms. The US's strategic advantage in this little war so far has been the value of the equity markets, which places Japan at a distinct disadvantage and makes US and UK firms, at least until they buy high in a bubble, masters of the acquisitions universe. In some ways it's possible to argue the US-Japan relationship is 'neoimperial'. Japan's strategic resource base is tied to US foreign policy, and Japan in most ways has no independent foreign policy--this is why there is so little progress with the Koreas, China or even Russia. Japan's 'defense' is tied into a US-Japan agreement that is more limiting and extraterritorial than NATO is in Europe (though the US military has always appreciated things like Mitsubishi avionics). The new phase (which I correlate with a stalled stock market in the US along with liberalization of capital movements, the phony war against terror notwithstanding) , though, is the US push to get inward direct investment into Japan--especially banks, insurance, finance and real estate (which reflects the 'strengths of the US economy in these areas--FIRE industries). This became so obvious when US representatives were proclaiming in public it was time for US interests to re-capitalize Japan's failed banking system (a claim which seemed ridiculous to everyone but the grasping Americans, since it is Japan with all the savings not going anywhere). However, little has been said about what is regulation for these new forces (US led and owned private equity, which finds its apotheosis perhaps in Carlyle Group using CALPERS money). And the need has become glaring with things like Enron and Andersen and the inherhent conflicts of interests at the investment banks (over analysis, consultation, the banks' own investments, and interests of its private equity clients). Indeed, inter-imperialist rivalry provoked WWI and WWII. For background on the last attempt by US imperialism to push Japan against the wall, see Jonathan Marshall's To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War. Yes, this is an excellent analysis. Many Americans are still in denial over what led to that disastrous war. Dower's 'War Without Mercy' is an excellent analysis of the ideologies used to justify the conflict. Charles Jannuzi
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Louis: Basically, I advocate anti-imperialist slogans in places like Argentina and Venezuela, in combination with demands against the local comprador bourgeoisie. The most powerful revolutions in this hemisphere over the past 50 years have identified with the historical colonial revolution, even though the countries were nominally independent: Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia and El Salvador. This means identifying and fighting against all attempts to control the country from outside, starting with the US Embassy to the oil companies that are bleeding Colombia dry. We have quite different understandings of what constitutes a powerful revolution. In short, I think Marx was right in the first place: a _proletarian_ revolution has a much greater chance of success and longevity if it takes place (or begins) in a society with an advanced economy. BTW, do you know why there has never been a coup in the USA? Because there is no US Embassy here. Well you might be interested to know that Australia probably has among the highest numbers of US diplomats per capita, at four US govt missions (Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth) in a country of 19 million. There is some evidence to support allegations of CIA involvement in the dismissal of Gough Whitlam as PM in 1975. I am talking about maquiladoras, mines and plantations owned by the bourgeoisie of the 3rd world employing white Canadians and Australians at sub-minimum wage while goons beat up or kill trade union organizers. There are large companies owned by third world (however you want to define that) proprietors in both Australia and Canada. I think history shows that capital (whether national, comprador or global) will do anything necessary and/or possible, including slavery and murder, wherever it operates. I don't know about Canada but in Australia capital has been constrained by unusual historical factors: e.g. long term shortages of skilled/experienced labour, immigration dominated by an aristocracy of labour, workers familiar with organisation (i.e. in Britain and Ireland) and who --- thanks to all of these factors --- were relatively militant. (This also led to the world's first ever governments by an avowed party of the working class [but as Lenin himself noted, not really _for_ the working class]: in the Colony of Queensland in 1899 and at the federal level in 1904.] Nevertheless, for many years now union membership has been declining, the deregulation of labour has increased and so has the rolling back of the welfare system. You are describing capitalism as it involves the two major classes in society. I am describing imperialism, which involves one nation subjugating another. It combines class and national oppression. If it hasn't been clear yet, I don't think that the oppression of one _whole_ society by another _whole_ society exists. There is no real universal in this case. To me imperialism is (1) a question of degree and (2) only meaningful when it refers to a particular class or classes from one national society exploiting labour in another national society. (In fact Marx _never_ used the word imperialism and did not distinguish between the logic of capital in metropolitan countries and in their empires, which is not to say the activities of capital in both were identical. cf Charles Barone, 1985, _Marxist_Thought_on_Imperialism:_Survey_and_Critique_) As I said above, what capital needs to do, it will do, to the greatest possible degree, to the nearest available workers in the weakest position. When a single African country begins to play this role, then maybe we can revisit the question. South Africa has attributes of both the third world and first world. Including multinational corporations. (If it matters --- and I'm not sure it does --- I would expect to see an increasing number of black shareholders and executives within these companies. Perhaps someone else has facts on this.) Regards, Grant.
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada (Comparative FDI)
Bill Burgess [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: country inward FDI stock/GDPoutward FDI stock/GDP Canada 23.9% 26.9% Australia 28.117.1 UK 23.335.9 France 11.715.9 Singapore 85.856.1 Malaysia67.022.7 Indonesia 73.32.4 Argentina 13.95.4 Brazil 17.11.4 Interesting figures. I haven't had time to look at the comparable figures for other countries. In any case they don't prove a permanent/structural exclusion from imperial activity. For example, what about Hong Kong (pre-1997, not that it is yet a homogenous part of China)? The last I heard there was hardly any manufacturing left in Hong Kong because proprietors had shifted operations to the mainland. South Africa? Saudi Arabia? Note the obvious difference in rates of outward FDI, plus the fact that most FDI by Canada, France, etc. is in other imperialist countries while most FDI by Indonesia, Argentina, etc. is in fellow semi-colonies. Every bourgeoisie has to start somewhere. For example --- and I'm not going to revisit the complexities and vitriol of the Kenya Debate --- but I just came across this on the web: Andrea Goldstein and Njuguna S. Ndung'u, OECD Development Centre Technical Paper No. 171: New Forms Of Co-Operation And Integration In Emerging Africa Regional Integration Experience, March 2001. quote: (p. 16) Table 5. Import Sources (1997)* (From)Kenya Tanzania Uganda (To)Kenya-0**0** Tanzania 10.4 -0 Uganda 25.90**- * These are percentages of total imports for the respective country. **The percentages are very small. Source:Report of the permanent Tripartite Commission for East African Co-operation: 1996-98. Obviously exports are not investment but the above suggests one reason why (p. 24) ... there are also restrictions on Kenyan investment in Uganda and Tanzania... (24) Singapore's inward and outward rates are both high, but note that inward FDI is still well above outward FDI in this city-state where annual trade is also 160% !!! of GDP. That trend is not unusual for countries with small populations and highly developed economies. What are the comparative figures for Belgium and Switzerland? Regards, Grant.
Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Grant Lee wrote: Louis, I'm sorry you feel that way. I took your reference to Lenin meant that you favoured the national front tactics of the early 1920s, which did involve bourgeois nationalists (in dependent countries). This only confuses things further. Lenin advocated support for nationalist movements as a means to an end: communism. This becomes clearer when you read his article on ultraleftism, which urges support for social democrats in terms of the way a rope supports a hanging man. I suggest nearly all of the world remains under the control of imperialism in the sense in which you use the word. This dissolves the concrete into the universal. If imperialism is the latest stage of capitalism, then of course it exists everywhere. However, we need to be able to distinguish between exploiter and exploited. For example, as I understand it, Michael Perelman is working on a book that will look at ecological imperialism. When Bolivian peasants were being forced to pay for water, it was a multinational corporation that was doing the charging. Bolivian corporations do not generally come to places like the USA and Australia to seize control of natural resources, do they? In 1900, Australia had a much higher standard of living relative to the rest of the world --- in fact probably the highest --- when it was officially six British colonies and dominated by British finance capital. The standard of living has declined significantly since then. I am puzzled. I just posted the UN data that indicated that Australia ranks SECOND in the world in terms of standard of living indicators. What kind of drop is this supposed to be then? Argentina ranked among the top nations in the world in the early 1900s but ranked SEVENTY-FIFTH in 2001. It has probably dropped lower. That is what we are dealing with, isn't it? What would the highest stage of colonialism/imperialism mean if not direct rule for the purposes of economic exploitation? (Exploitation being inherent in all capitalist relations of production.) Lenin spoke in terms of super-profits. In third world countries, you have a reserve army of the unemployed and repression against trade unionists and the left. This leads to maquiladoras and all the rest. If Guatemalan multinationals were coming to Canada in order to pay the natives 3 dollars a day to sew dresses for K-Mart, we'd be entitled to speak about all capitalist relations of production being generalized or some such thing. This does not happen, however. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Louis: You said: But I am trying to address the question of whether Argentina is qualitatively different from Great Britain. My purpose in these posts is to answer a current within Marxism that asserts that there is no difference. In that case you were complicating matters by referring to other cases (e.g. Canada and Australia). I simply responded to what I perceived as a critique of the (very widely held) view that there are significant historical similarities between the economies of Argentina and Australia. In regard to the following: I am trying to help Marxists make elementary distinctions that will help them carry out solidarity work, not develop a class analysis of Great Britain or Canada. and I am dealing with the question of national oppression and You don't seem to find the category imperialist meaningful in the sense that Lenin did. Not necessarily. I would ask: why would Marxists any longer seek solidarity with bourgeois nationalists, except in the now rare circumstances where the formal national question has never been resolved? The world has changed a great deal since Lenin's lifetime: in particular, there are now very few cases of formal/legal/military/direct control. Do you not see decolonisation since 1945 as a major historical event? Isn't there a world of difference between imperialism in India in 1920 and Argentina in 2002? But Australia is not a semicolony in the sense that Argentina is. Why not? Pushing countries around is not the same as imperialism. Because the USA is hegemonic, it can influence economic and political affairs across the globe. But it has a different kind of relationship to Latin American countries than it does to European countries. Does European include Australia? That will be good news to the miniscule conservative faction that has floated the idea of EU membership. If your Europe does include Australia, then there is evidence of more than hegemonic interference by the US in economic and political affairs here. There is a wealth of literature that has explained this, from Baran-Sweezy to Wallerstein. Those are my ideological influences. What are yours? I agree strongly with the classic formulation that ideology is false consciousness. If you mean theoretical influences, then my view is that there is no substitute for Marx's own method (even if I disagree with the way he used it on some occasions). There is also a powerful bourgeoisie that includes people like Rupert Murdoch. This is not a good example; News Corporation has been based in New York for years. Murdoch is also now a US citizen, if that means anything. I'm sure there are ex-Argentine billionaires as well. Let Argentine capitalists off the hook? If you want to have a discussion with me, don't put words in my mouth. I apologise and hope to read a full discussion of their activities. Regards, Grant Lee.
Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
On Mon, 15 Apr 2002 15:29:15 +0800, Grant Lee wrote: I would ask: why would Marxists any longer seek solidarity with bourgeois nationalists, except in the now rare circumstances where the formal national question has never been resolved? In my last reply to you, I urged you not to put words in my mouth. Now, once again, you would accuse me of seeking solidarity with bourgeois nationalists. Therefore, after replying to you this final time, I will ignore your future remarks on this thread. I have not accused you of seeking solidarity with imperialist powers, have I? The world has changed a great deal since Lenin's lifetime: in particular, there are now very few cases of formal/legal/military/direct control. Do you not see decolonisation since 1945 as a major historical event? Isn't there a world of difference between imperialism in India in 1920 and Argentina in 2002? No, I do not see decolonization as a major historical event. Imperialism deals with class relations, not which flag is flying over a country. This is the reason that Hugo Chavez calls his movement Bolivarist. He understands that all of Latin America remains under the control of imperialism, despite formal independence. Why not? Why is Australia not a semicolony? Because it ranks number 2 in the world in terms of Human Development, according to the UN (http://www.undp.org/hdr2001/), with a GDP per capita of $24,574. If it were a semicolony, these figures would not obtain. -- Louis Proyect, [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 04/15/2002 Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Louis, I'm sorry you feel that way. I took your reference to Lenin meant that you favoured the national front tactics of the early 1920s, which did involve bourgeois nationalists (in dependent countries). Imperialism deals with class relations, not which flag is flying over a country. I agree. But why then would Lenin have bothered to seek ties with bourgeois independence movements in the European overseas empires? Because he believed there could be no workers' revolution until formal national questions had been solved. In nearly all cases they have been, showing both the emptiness of nationalism and the futility of alliances between marxists and nationalists. This is the reason that Hugo Chavez calls his movement Bolivarist. He understands that all of Latin America remains under the control of imperialism, despite formal independence. I suggest nearly all of the world remains under the control of imperialism in the sense in which you use the word. Why is Australia not a semicolony? Because it ranks number 2 in the world in terms of Human Development, according to the UN (http://www.undp.org/hdr2001/), with a GDP per capita of $24,574. If it were a semicolony, these figures would not obtain. In 1900, Australia had a much higher standard of living relative to the rest of the world --- in fact probably the highest --- when it was officially six British colonies and dominated by British finance capital. The standard of living has declined significantly since then. What would the highest stage of colonialism/imperialism mean if not direct rule for the purposes of economic exploitation? (Exploitation being inherent in all capitalist relations of production.) Regards, Grant Lee.
Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
On Sun, 14 Apr 2002 10:23:17 +0800, Grant Lee wrote: Louis: If it isn't already clear, I find references to monolithic, single-minded exploitative entities called Great Britain or the United States to be untenable generalisations, which ignore the complexity of real class structures and the historical agency of indigenous layers of capital (in particular). But I am trying to address the question of whether Argentina is qualitatively different from Great Britain. My purpose in these posts is to answer a current within Marxism that asserts that there is no difference. Not surprisingly, these currents flourish in Great Britain and were either neutral during the Malvinas war, or damned Argentina with faint praise. I am also trying to explain why the national question is on the agenda for Argentina, while it would not be for Canada, for example. Recently, a founder of Canadian Trotskyism named Ross Dowson passed away. He developed the rather novel theory late in life that Canada was semicolonial and promoted a kind of left-nationalism. He was quite wrong. I am trying to help Marxists make elementary distinctions that will help them carry out solidarity work, not develop a class analysis of Great Britain or Canada. If I were to do so, I would be posting for the next 10 years. My time is limited. No, Whitehall didn't have to send gunboats to Australia because British state force was there in large numbers from day one. And they were also quite willing to use force against their own subjects. I am not sure what you are driving at. The USA used state force against miners in Colorado and Philippine freedom-fighters in the early 1900s. But the USA was qualitatively different from the Philippines. I am dealing with the question of national oppression, which became the focus of revolutionary socialism during the early years of the Comintern: At the fourth session of the Baku Conference on July 26, 1920, Lenin said, First, what is the cardinal idea underlying our theses? It is the distinction between oppressed and oppressor NATIONS. He also referred to Comrade Quelch of the British Socialist Party who said that the rank-and-file British worker would consider it treasonable to help the enslaved NATIONS in their uprisings against British rule. These are the sorts of distinctions I am trying to make. To say that you have never heard anybody refer to Australia as a victim of imperialism is to also overgeneralising; obviously millions of Australians were and are victims of imperialism, if not necessarily in the same ways that workers in Nepal or the Netherlands are victims. But Australia is not a semicolony in the sense that Argentina is. British finance capital used its market dominance to rip off everyone in the 19th Century, including other layers of British capital. One kind of rip off was bullying weak states to pay exorbitant amounts for infrastructure. You don't seem to find the category imperialist meaningful in the sense that Lenin did. Yes, they did this to the weak 19th Century colonial states in Australia. Is that surprising? US-based capital still does it to Australian governments. Pushing countries around is not the same as imperialism. Because the USA is hegemonic, it can influence economic and political affairs across the globe. But it has a different kind of relationship to Latin American countries than it does to European countries. There is a wealth of literature that has explained this, from Baran-Sweezy to Wallerstein. Those are my ideological influences. What are yours? Was Australia based on something like the latifundia? Not in the sense of peasant agriculture; however in some ways Australia was arguably more backward prior to 1850 and until well into the 20th Century in northern Australia, since the main productive activities in those times/regions, especially large scale pastoralism, relied on unfree labour: at first British convicts, later Aborigines, South East Asians and Pacific Islanders. That is only aspect of Australian class society. There is also a powerful bourgeoisie that includes people like Rupert Murdoch. A pertinent metaphor, since the economies focused on exports of raw materials, like Argentina, Australia and Canada were actually the worst affected by the Great Depression. Eventually a mass radical movement gave them the understanding that the fault is in capitalism, not theirs. This is the lesson I am trying to impart for Argentina. I fully appreciate that; but why let Argentine capitalists off the hook? Let Argentine capitalists off the hook? If you want to have a discussion with me, don't put words in my mouth. -- Louis Proyect, [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 04/14/2002 Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Re: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Left nationalism is nothing new in Canada and it certainly not a novel theory of Ross Dowson. Left nationalism was a strong current in the NDP (New Democractic Party) a social democratic party that ruled in BC, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and even Ontario for a while. It still governs Manitoba and Saskatchewan. This is a federal manifesto though of 1969 Cheers Ken Hanly The Waffle Manifesto Waffle Resolution 133 Our aim as democratic socialists is to build an independent socialist Canada. Our Aim as supporters of the New Democratic Party is to make it a truly socialist party. The achievement of socialism awaits the building of a mass base of socialists in factories and offices, on farms and campuses. The development of socialist consciousness, on which can be built a socialist base, must be the first priority of the New Democratic Party. The New Democratic Party must be seen as the parliamentary wing of a movement dedicated to fundamental social change. It must be radicalized from within and it must be radicalized from without. The most urgent issue for Canadians is the very survival of Canada. Anxiety is pervasive and the goal of greater economic independence receives widespread support. But economic independence without socialism is a sham, and neither are meaningful without true participatory democracy. The major threat to Canadian survival today is American control of the Canadian economy. The major issue of our times is not national unity but national survival, and the fundamental threat is external, not internal. American corporate capitalism is the dominant factor shaping Canadian society. In Canada American economic control operates through the formidable medium of the multinational corporation. The Canadian corporate elite has opted for a junior partnership with these American enterprises. Canada has been reduced to a resource base and consumer market within the American empire. The American empire is the central reality for Canadians. It is an empire characterized by militarism abroad and racism at home. Canadian resources and diplomacy have been enlisted in the support of that empire. In the barbarous war in Vietnam, Canada has supported the United States through its membership on the International Control Commission and through sales of arms and strategic resources to the American military-industrial complex. The American empire is held together through world-wide military alliances and by giant corporations. Canada's membership in the American alliance system and the ownership of the Canadian economy by American corporations precluded Canada's playing an independent role in the world. These bonds must be cut if corporate capitalism and the social priorities it creates is to be effectively challenged. Canadian development is distorted by a corporate capitalist economy. Corporate investment creates and fosters superfluous individual consumption at the expense of social needs. Corporate decision making concentrates investment in a few major urban areas which become increasingly uninhabitable while the rest of the country sinks into underdevelopment. The criterion that the most profitable pursuits are the most important ones causes the neglect of activities whose value cannot be measured by the standard of profitability. It is not accidental that housing, education, medical care and public transportation are inadequately provided for by the present social system. The problem of regional disparities is rooted in the profit orientation of capitalism. The social costs of stagnant areas are irrelevant to the corporations. For Canada the problem is compounded by the reduction of Canada to the position of an economic colony of the United States. The foreign capitalist has even less concern for balanced development of the country than the Canadian capitalist with roots in a particular region. An independence movement based on substituting Canadian capitalists for American capitalists, or on public policy to make foreign corporations behave as if they were Canadian corporations, cannot be our final objective. There is not now an independent Canadian capitalism and any lingering pretensions on the part of Canadian businessmen to independence lack credibility. Without a strong national capitalist class behind them, Canadian governments, Liberal and Conservative, have functioned in the interests of international and particularly American capitalism, and have lacked the will to pursue even a modest strategy of economic independence. Capitalism must be replaced by socialism, by national planning of investment and by the public ownership of the means of production in the interests of the Canadian people as a whole. Canadian nationalism is a relevant force on which to build to the extent that it is anti-imperialist. On the road to socialism, such aspirations for independence must be taken into account. For to pursue independence seriously is to make visible the necessity of socialism in Canada.
The Collapse of Argentina, part 2: The golden age
Marxists have to maintain a constant vigilance against stereotypical thinking, especially when it comes to Latin America. In researching the Brenner thesis, I observed a kind of 'Iberiantalist' imagery about vainglorious hidalgos in Peru or New Spain who wasted gold and silver on luxuries in contrast to thrifty, hardworking British colonists. Recent research, however, reveals that the Spanish were fully capable of capitalist growth despite not being raised in the Protestant faith. D.A. Brading states that there was little to distinguish 18th century Mexico City from Boston of the same time. In fact, the textile mills of Mexico City, capitalized by mining revenues, put Boston to shame. Ironically, the opposite kind of stereotype seems to have developed around Argentina. Instead of seeing it as a semicolony whose development has been stunted by imperialism, much of the left seizes upon superficial aspects and groups it with Australia, Canada or New Zealand. Granted, all these countries have lots of prairies and European immigrants, and enjoyed a modicum of prosperity in the 20th century, but much more analysis is required. This post will try to supply that. To begin with, we have to acknowledge that at first blush Argentina did give the impression of being on the fast-track to capitalist success in the early 20th century. Between 1869 and 1929, productivity rose at an average of nearly 5 percent, while total capital rose at an average of nearly the same rate. Income per capita jumped from 2,308 pesos (at constant 1950 prices) in 1900-1904 to 3,207 pesos in 1925-1929. The national censuses of 1869, 1895 and 1914 also display impressive growth. By 1914, 5.9 million immigrants, of whom 3.2 million became permanent residents, joined the 1.9 million who were resident in 1869. The city of Buenos Aires grew by 786 percent (!) between 1869 and 1914. The land under cultivation increased from 1.5 million hectares in 1872 to 25 million hectares in 1914. The railroad network, albeit a tentacle of British control, was 35,800 km. long in 1914. Reflecting British confidence in the economy, their investments in Argentina increased fro 5 million pounds in 1865 to 365 million in 1913. (Corradi, 335) Yet, this rapid growth would eventually hit the wall for a simple reason: the engine propelling the vehicle was based on the latifundia agro-export model. Argentina had become the main supplier of beef, hides and grain to Great Britain. The profits from such sales were not, however, re-invested in industry. Although far less class polarized than Cuba or Brazil, whose economies also revolved around the plantation or ranch, Argentina's difficulties--even to this day--reflect the domination of a class alliance between the landed gentry and foreign capitalism. For Argentina to have enjoyed long-term prosperity, it would have to institute radical land reform, foster the growth of local industry in a protectionist setting and develop a balanced internal market for both agrarian and urban goods. Needless to say, that is impossible under capitalism. Michael Johns describes the class relations that determined the Argentine economy in the following terms: In sum, the agrarian rent that anchored Argentina's ruling class, the merchant's capital that exported the Pampa's produce and imported European commodities, and the finance capital that enabled the elite to profit from an erratic economy and sustain a monopoly hold on land governed the Argentine economy. These three factors thwarted the formation of a more rigorous economic logic by frustrating the development of a strong manufacturing sector and, consequently, the discipline that a commanding circuit of industrial capital would have imparted to the economy as a whole. Argentina, I show, lacked a consummate industrial capital that disseminated its logic throughout the economy, a logic critical to capitalist development because it demands continuous investments of fixed capital, technological improvements (and thus increases in labor productivity), an accelerated turnover of capital, and greater competitiveness. Argentina's turn of the century capitalism was consequently parasitic, inefficient, and led by a coalition of rentiers, financiers, and merchants who relied on Argentina's truly comparative, if fleeting, advantage in the world market. (194) The consumption/investment habits of the Argentine ruling class was typical of those of other Latin American economies dominated by the latifundia. Based mostly in Buenos Aires, the bourgeoisie received as much as 25 percent of Argentina's GDP through land rent. With this revenue, they spent a significant portion on goods manufactured in the USA or Europe. As Johns points out, The elite's ardent desire to prove its cosmopolitan stature translated into a fetishism of foreign goods. No doubt such consumption habits shaped the cultural views of a sector of Argentine
RE: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yea, there is a lot of superficial truth in this account, at least as relative to Canada. But there is also a lot of overgeneralization and obfuscation in this account also. Since I have already published several hundreds of pages and articles on this subject Where? I'd like to read some of this. Doug Since Doug Asked, Here is the list of my publications in the area of Canadian economic development with particular reference to regional impacts on class formation and the distribution of the gains of development. Concentration is on the 1860--1920 period though there are a couple from an earlier period (on land tenure) and on the later period involving the shift from Can-GB economic dependency to Can-US dependency. I have not included those specifically on staples or on labour. Paul Phillips Books: Regional Disparities. (Toronto: Lorimer, 1978). (Revised edition, 1982). Labour and Capital in Canada: 16401860, by H.C. Pentland, edited and with an introduction by Paul Phillips. (Toronto: Lorimer, 1981). Essays in the Historical Political Economy of Canada (Winnipeg: Society of Socialist Studies Publications, 2001) Published Articles and Chapters: Confederation and the Economy of British Columbia, British Columbia and Confederation, ed. by George Shelton. (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1967). The National Policy and the Development of the Western Canadian Labour Movement, Prairie Perspectives 2, ed. by A.W. Rasporich and H.C. Klassen. (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). Land Tenure and Development in Upper and Lower Canada, Journal of Canadian Studies,May, 1974. The Mining Frontier in B.C. 18801920, Visual History Series. (National Museums of Canada and the National Film Board, 1975). Vernon C. Fowke and the Hinterland Perspective, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Vol. 2, No. 2, SpringSummer, 1979. The National Policy Revisited, Journal of Canadian Studies, Autumn, 1979. The Prairie Urban System, 19111961: Specialization and Change, Town and City: Aspects of Western Canadian Urban Development, ed. by A. Artibise. (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1980). From Mobilization to Continentalism: The Canadian Economy 19391972, (with Stephen Watson), Modern Canada, ed. by G. Kealey and M. Cross, CanadianSocial History Series, Vol. 5. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984). Unequal Exchange, Surplus Value and the CommercialIndustrial Question,Explorations in Economic History: Essays in Honour of Irene Spry, ed. by Duncan Cameron. (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1985). Retrospection and Revisionism: Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,Journal of Canadian Studies, October, 1987. The Underground Economy: The Mining Frontier to 1920, Workers, Capital, and the State in British Columbia, ed. by Rennie Warburton and David Coburn (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1988). Easternising Manitoba: The Changing Economy of the New West, London Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 5, 1988. Manitoba in the Agrarian Period: 18701940, The Political Economy of Manitoba, ed. by J. Silver and J. Hull (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1990). The Canadian Prairies Once Economic Region or Two, The Constitutional Future of the Prairie and Atlantic Regions of Canada, ed. by James McCrorie and MarthaMacDonald (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1992). PostMortem for Canadian Regional Policy, Acadiensis, Summer 1992. Unpublished Papers: The 'Great War' and Primitive Accumulation: War Finance and Class Formation in Canada 19141923, University of Manitoba Economics Department Seminar Series, November 14, 1997. Canada and the West: Then and Now, Paper to the Territorial Grain Growers Association Centenary Symposium, Regina, November 245, 2001.
Re: RE: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Louis tells us that that the British behaved differently toward Argentina than Canada. Why? Was it because the settlers were ethnically different in Argentina from those in Canada? Did Britain have to behave differently toward Commonwealth countries? Paul, could you give us a brief outline of the answer? I also enclosed a quote from very interesting book that I know Lou has read. Drayton, Richard. 2000. Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press). 104: The American Revolution taught the British that they should desire colonies with dissimilar climates to their own so that the colonies with the complements rather than competitors. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: RE: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Michael, I don't know enough about Argentina to do a proper comparison, but a few points on Canada -- since the break with British colonialism in Canada's case was initiated by Britain over the opposition of the ruling elite in Canada. 1. The British were losing money on the Canadian colonies since the cost of defense for such a few isolated colonies against American imperialism was heavy. (e.g. war of 1812-14). 2. There were 'liberal' revolts (incipient revolutions) against the colonial elite by the farmers and small business in 1837 which led Britain to appoint a commission to find an answer to the failing colonial administration. A particular problem was Quebec which held no allegience to Britain and was opposed by the increasing numbers of British (Irish) immigrants and Empire Loyalists from the US. There was also a self-rule movement in the Maritimes. Remember, at this time, Canada existed as essentially 8 different colonies each under different forms of rule (from the Chartered Company rule of the Hudson's Bay Company over the Northwest Territories and over Vancouver Island and British Columbia until the gold rush) to the various forms of semi-independent colonial regimes in the Maritimes and Upper and Lower Canada. 3. The rise of the free trade (anti-corn law) movement in Britain meant the end of colonial preference for Canada's major staple industries -- end of timber preferences, end of the corn laws, end of the navigation acts -- completely gutted the commercial empire of the St. Lawrence, the merchant-capitalist system based on exports to Britain, the leading one being timber. US grain shipped through Canada was given preference as Canadian grain and with that, Canadian merchants had financed canal and railway systems (1840s-1850s) backed by British bondholders. This all came crashing down with the end of the Br. Imperial System. The Canadian colonies were told to go on their own and the British tried to negotiate the cheapest deal possible. 4. The Canadian alternative was to a. join the US; b, negotiate a 'free trade agreement'; c. amalgamate into an independent country. B. was tried but the US repudiated the treaty as a result of the civil war. A. was rejected by the Canadian population. C was the final result with the formation of Canada with the British North America Act of 1867. Confederation was the compromise solution of domestic commercial-financial capital. To the extent there was any industrial capital interest it was tied up with the railways which were financed in Britain but run for the benefit of Canadian commercial capital. The evolution of industrial capital is a much more complicated question but really post-dates Canadian 'independence'. However, this is the subject of a major debate of interpretation of Canadian development which I won't go into here. Paul Phillips Date sent: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 12:31:55 -0700 From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:[PEN-L:24882] Re: RE: Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Louis tells us that that the British behaved differently toward Argentina than Canada. Why? Was it because the settlers were ethnically different in Argentina from those in Canada? Did Britain have to behave differently toward Commonwealth countries? Paul, could you give us a brief outline of the answer? I also enclosed a quote from very interesting book that I know Lou has read. Drayton, Richard. 2000. Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press). 104: The American Revolution taught the British that they should desire colonies with dissimilar climates to their own so that the colonies with the complements rather than competitors. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Argentina, Australia and Canada
Louis: If it isn't already clear, I find references to monolithic, single-minded exploitative entities called Great Britain or the United States to be untenable generalisations, which ignore the complexity of real class structures and the historical agency of indigenous layers of capital (in particular). For example, you say Great Britain built railways in Argentina as though it was the British state/society and not a few British companies, backed by the occasional gunboat. (BTW Is the Argentine parliamentarian you cite a Marxian political economist?) No, Whitehall didn't have to send gunboats to Australia because British state force was there in large numbers from day one. And they were also quite willing to use force against their own subjects. To say that you have never heard anybody refer to Australia as a victim of imperialism is to also overgeneralising; obviously millions of Australians were and are victims of imperialism, if not necessarily in the same ways that workers in Nepal or the Netherlands are victims. British finance capital used its market dominance to rip off everyone in the 19th Century, including other layers of British capital. One kind of rip off was bullying weak states to pay exorbitant amounts for infrastructure. Yes, they did this to the weak 19th Century colonial states in Australia. Is that surprising? US-based capital still does it to Australian governments. Was Australia based on something like the latifundia? Not in the sense of peasant agriculture; however in some ways Australia was arguably more backward prior to 1850 and until well into the 20th Century in northern Australia, since the main productive activities in those times/regions, especially large scale pastoralism, relied on unfree labour: at first British convicts, later Aborigines, South East Asians and Pacific Islanders. What I wrote to my Argentine friend in consolation was pretty much what I said to you: it is a failure of the global bourgeoisie, the Argentine bourgeoisie in particular and the Argentine bourgeois state, not Argentine wage earners. During the early years of the Great Depression, unemployed men would blame themselves for their failure. A pertinent metaphor, since the economies focused on exports of raw materials, like Argentina, Australia and Canada were actually the worst affected by the Great Depression. Eventually a mass radical movement gave them the understanding that the fault is in capitalism, not theirs. This is the lesson I am trying to impart for Argentina. I fully appreciate that; but why let Argentine capitalists off the hook? Regards, Grant Lee.
