• The news was announced by who is now truly in charge of the Argentine Government: the United States Minister of Economy, Scott Bessent. The Treasury of that country intervened for the first time in decades in the Argentine financial market to buy pesos and close a “swap” for US$ 20,000 million, in an unprecedented and enormous lifeline to avoid the catastrophe of the economic plan and support Javier Milei before the legislative elections on October 26.
• Neither euphemisms nor metaphors: it is direct political support for a Government in the campaign and in the process of decomposition. Or, more explicitly, it is a campaign contribution and, therefore, an obvious interference in the internal politics of our country. It’s not new; What is new is the open and almost pornographic nature of the intervention. The immediate effect was a respite for the dollar price, a nod to bonds and the easy headline: “Argentine assets rise.” The underlying effect—the true effect—: taking dependency and vassalage to levels never seen before, moving towards the transformation of Argentina into another star on the Yankee flag.
• Bessent said it clearly a while after the announcement and in a TV program: one of the commitments (others will become known, because this is going to be very expensive) is that the Argentine Government expel China from the country and help the United States to remove it from the region.
• Let’s see, this is not a “defense of China”, which also has its interests (in many cases with colonialist objectives); It is about defending the sovereignty and autonomy of our country to decide with whom it is appropriate to trade or not, in accordance with national interests. This Government not only handed over a master key for the US administration to direct the Argentine economy, but now also gave up much of the control of foreign policy. Our country would have to define its allies or enemies in the international arena according to its own needs, not depending on who the allies or enemies of the United States are.
• But there is more: as Paul Krugman warned, this was also a bailout for Bessent’s “friends” in Argentina: investment funds that made money all their lives as Bessent’s partners in “the private sector” and that are involved in Argentine timba, therefore they needed a bailout. Give the names of the final beneficiaries of this support. Truly obscene.
• Thirdly – and this was said by Emmanuel Álvarez Agis in an interview –: going to ask for a bailout from an economy that is more powerful (imperial) and that also competes in many areas with yours can only result in more setbacks being imposed on your production and more collapse of your country. The height of sepoyism, which cannot have good results in any way.
• Now, in this context (allow me this parenthesis), while the Government is making this delivery, it is not only saved from above, eh. Domestic politics played its part: a sector of “dialoguist” governors—renamed “United Provinces”—and their benches prevented the advancement of a law to limit the abusive use of the DNU, giving air to the ruling party in the Deputies and kicking the discussion back to the Senate. But the legislators referenced in Osvaldo Jaldo (Tucumán), today integrated into the Fuerza Patria force, also contributed absences, the same ones who have been the key to the quorum for the core laws of mileism. The misrepresenters of the famous “the worst of us is better than the best of them” end up verifying that the worst of you, when the potatoes burn, is theirs.
• Returning to the main point: it is evident that there is a colonial and imperial advance on the sovereignty of our country. They are going to collect this financial support with the attempt to expel their competitors, with the delivery of our common goods to the North American monopolies or their banks. That’s a fact. Even people who believed that “imperialism” or “nationalism” were things of the past—romantic ideas that only the left held—today say that this cannot be called anything else.
• So the question is: what to do? Or what do those who oppose Milei propose to do? Among them, the bulk of Peronism which, it must be said, is going into an electoral campaign without programmatic definitions on nodal issues: what to do with the debt, with the IMF, with financial capital, with the banks, with foreign trade, with current privatizations and those to come, etc.
• Axel Kicillof tweeted a phrase by Arturo Jauretche (“If the gringo who buys from us is bad, the Creole who sells to us is worse”). Very pretty. Sometimes Jauretche is nice—he’s not my cup of tea, but hey. Now, here we are not talking about phrases from Jauretche or t-shirts with phrases from Indio and Los Redondos; It’s a question of what is going to be done with all this.
• Is this new debt, which is as or more fraudulent than all the previous ones, going to be sovereignly ignored? Is the banking system going to be nationalized to regain control over it and the financial system? Gabriel Sued told The Uncovering that investment fund managers—JP Morgan among them—operated directly on the deputies to warn them that, if the DNU law was approved without changes, Donald Trump’s bailout could fall. In other words: they impose their interests with open extortion. They give a lot of argument to be fairly limited or expropriated.
• With the sovereign administration of foreign trade and strategic currencies, what is going to be done? Are you going to leave it in the hands of five or six cereal companies that earned 1.5 billion dollars one weekend?
• What about salary and pensions? Kristalina Georgieva of the IMF, stating that Milei’s success depends on whether people support it, said: “In my part of the world, in Central and Eastern Europe, we had examples of brave leaders who did very difficult things, cut pensions and salaries by 40% or 50%, and were re-elected.” Do you understand what is considered “brave”?
• Well, in the face of this, phrases that sound good say nothing: they fall empty. The right proposes a program: market until it hurts. Georgieva proposes a program: cut salaries and pensions (even more!). Bessent proposes a program: they want to reign in Argentina and they want its resources. The only answer to all that is an opposite program. Everything else is literature.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
