Read Online Fences and Windows by Naomi Klein - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Naomi Klein
Ads: Link
macro as the IMF would be implicated in an issue as micro as the Ayacucho eviction. But here in a country where half the population has fallen below the poverty line, it’s hard to find any sector of society whose fate does not somehow hinge on the decisions made by the international lender.
Librarians, teachers and other public sector workers, who have been getting paid in hastily printed provincial currencies, won’t get paid at all if the provinces agree to stop printing the money, as the IMF is demanding. And if deeper cuts are made to the public sector, as the lenderis also insisting, unemployed workers, 30 percent of the workforce, will be even closer to the homelessness and hunger that has led thousands to storm supermarkets demanding food.
And if a solution isn’t found to the recently declared medical state of emergency, it will certainly affect a woman I met on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. In a fit of shame and desperation, she pulled up her blouse and showed me the open wound and hanging tubes from a stomach operation that her doctor was not able to stitch up or dress due to a chronic shortage of medical supplies.
Maybe it seems rude to talk about such matters here. Economic analysis is supposed to be about the peg to the dollar, “pesoification,” and the dangers of “stagflation”—not children losing homes or elderly women’s gaping wounds. Yet the reckless advice being hurled at Argentina’s government from beyond its borders perhaps demands a little personalizing.
In free-market circles, the consensus is that the IMF should see Argentina’s crisis not as an obstacle to further austerity but as an opportunity: the country is so desperate for cash, the reasoning goes, that it will do whatever the IMF wants. “During a crisis is when you need to act, it’s when Congress is most receptive,” explains Winston Fritsch, chairman of Dresdner Bank AG’s Brazilian unit.
The most draconian suggestion has come from Ricardo Cabellero and Rudiger Dornbusch, a pair of MIT economists writing in
The Financial Times
. “It’s time to get radical,” they say. Argentina “must temporarily surrender its sovereignty onall financial issues & give up much of its monetary, fiscal, regulatory and asset management sovereignty for an extended period, say five years.” The country’s economy—its “spending, money printing and tax administration”—should be controlled by “foreign agents,” including “a board of experienced foreign central bankers.”
In a nation still scarred by the disappearance of thirty thousand people during the 1976 to 1983 military dictatorship, only a “foreign agent” would have the nerve to say, as the MIT team does, that “somebody has to run the country with a tight grip.” Yet it seems that repression is the necessary pre-condition to the real work of saving the country, which, according to Cabellero and Dornbusch, involves prying open markets, introducing deeper spending cuts and, of course, a “massive privatization campaign.”
It’s the usual recipe, only this time, there’s a hitch: Argentina has already done it all. As the IMF’s model student throughout the nineties, it flung open its economy (which is why it’s been so easy for capital to flee since the crisis began). As far as Argentina’s supposedly wild public spending goes, a full third goes directly to servicing the external debt. Another third goes to pension funds, which have already been privatized. The remaining third—some of which actually goes to health care, education and social assistance—has fallen far behind population growth, which is why shipments of donated food and medicine are arriving by boat from Spain.
As for “massive privatization,” Argentina has dutifully sold off so many of its services, from trains to phones, that the only examples of further assets Cabellero and Dornbusch can thinkof privatizing are the country’s ports and customs offices.
No wonder so many who
Librarians, teachers and other public sector workers, who have been getting paid in hastily printed provincial currencies, won’t get paid at all if the provinces agree to stop printing the money, as the IMF is demanding. And if deeper cuts are made to the public sector, as the lenderis also insisting, unemployed workers, 30 percent of the workforce, will be even closer to the homelessness and hunger that has led thousands to storm supermarkets demanding food.
And if a solution isn’t found to the recently declared medical state of emergency, it will certainly affect a woman I met on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. In a fit of shame and desperation, she pulled up her blouse and showed me the open wound and hanging tubes from a stomach operation that her doctor was not able to stitch up or dress due to a chronic shortage of medical supplies.
Maybe it seems rude to talk about such matters here. Economic analysis is supposed to be about the peg to the dollar, “pesoification,” and the dangers of “stagflation”—not children losing homes or elderly women’s gaping wounds. Yet the reckless advice being hurled at Argentina’s government from beyond its borders perhaps demands a little personalizing.
In free-market circles, the consensus is that the IMF should see Argentina’s crisis not as an obstacle to further austerity but as an opportunity: the country is so desperate for cash, the reasoning goes, that it will do whatever the IMF wants. “During a crisis is when you need to act, it’s when Congress is most receptive,” explains Winston Fritsch, chairman of Dresdner Bank AG’s Brazilian unit.
The most draconian suggestion has come from Ricardo Cabellero and Rudiger Dornbusch, a pair of MIT economists writing in
The Financial Times
. “It’s time to get radical,” they say. Argentina “must temporarily surrender its sovereignty onall financial issues & give up much of its monetary, fiscal, regulatory and asset management sovereignty for an extended period, say five years.” The country’s economy—its “spending, money printing and tax administration”—should be controlled by “foreign agents,” including “a board of experienced foreign central bankers.”
In a nation still scarred by the disappearance of thirty thousand people during the 1976 to 1983 military dictatorship, only a “foreign agent” would have the nerve to say, as the MIT team does, that “somebody has to run the country with a tight grip.” Yet it seems that repression is the necessary pre-condition to the real work of saving the country, which, according to Cabellero and Dornbusch, involves prying open markets, introducing deeper spending cuts and, of course, a “massive privatization campaign.”
It’s the usual recipe, only this time, there’s a hitch: Argentina has already done it all. As the IMF’s model student throughout the nineties, it flung open its economy (which is why it’s been so easy for capital to flee since the crisis began). As far as Argentina’s supposedly wild public spending goes, a full third goes directly to servicing the external debt. Another third goes to pension funds, which have already been privatized. The remaining third—some of which actually goes to health care, education and social assistance—has fallen far behind population growth, which is why shipments of donated food and medicine are arriving by boat from Spain.
As for “massive privatization,” Argentina has dutifully sold off so many of its services, from trains to phones, that the only examples of further assets Cabellero and Dornbusch can thinkof privatizing are the country’s ports and customs offices.
No wonder so many who
Similar Books
