Crisis Update: Argentina’s President-Elect Milei Is An Enigma

Until you look at his WEF, Wallenberg and HSBC connections

• The press presents Milei as ‘far-right outsider’ but he sits in the globalist nest

• His shock therapy comes from the IMF list of prescriptions

• Likes to mime Mick Jagger: Can’t Get No Satisfaction as president?

• Is Milei even a libertarian, praising the Pinochet-Chicago School dictatorship?

• Aims to adopt USD, shut central bank, in pitch to quell 185% inflation

• Economy to shrink 2% as foreign reserves slump to lowest since 2006

• Sale of national assets, replacement of services by PPP is pure WEF

• Threatens to militarise country if necessary, in mirror of Ukraine’s Zelenskiy

• What you see is rockstar chameleon – look to his contacts

• Inversion, normalisation of theft and genocide, suggests: what’s to trust?

• Globalists are desperate; they will try any ploy: watch his actions

• Does Milei represent change or more of the same?

See also: ‘Philanthropy’ Is The Third Pillar Of Fascism (May 27, 2022)
From Argentina To A Street Near You - A crisis born of elite conceit is about to be exported around the world (Aug 16, 2022)
(3,100 words or about a quarter-hour of your company.)

Nov 20, 2023

It seems the World Economic Forum got its candidate in Argentina. Javier Milei wants to withdraw from BRICS, privatise everything, sell off state institutions and return the country, in his own words, to where it was 100 years ago.

His trump card is to adopt the U.S. dollar as the national currency. He argues it is the only way to escape triple-digit inflation and pay off debt that is holding the country to ransom through vulture funds like BlackRock.

A century ago Argentina was the seventh-largest economy; the land of the future, with the culture of Europe and the expanse of Latin America.

Regaining that buena vista is a challenge weighted down with all that has happened in those intervening years.

More papers have been written on Argentina’s malaise than perhaps any other country, for it it exposes the contradictions in the promise of free trade; the venal and captured international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund; and the deception by which finance capital makes war on those it intends to make captive.

Argentina is shorthand for the rot at the heart of the world trade system, and the hypocrisy of those who rebrand their plundering as “stakeholder capitalism.”

Enter stage left: BlackRock.

BlackRock's “kinder capitalism” proves hypocritical when Larry Fink prefers to keep Argentinians in poverty — including more than 40 per cent of children — rather than take any losses on his bonds.

Argentina’s external debt in 2023 is more than $270 billion dollars and total debt exceeds 30 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) – source, Trading Economics.

It is a level of debt that is inescapable. It is not a financial tool, it is a trap. And venture capital firms exploit it as such.

Paul Singer’s Elliott Management bought $832 million in Argentine debt at 6 cents on the dollar, paying $48 million. After Argentina defaulted in 2001, more than 90 per cent of bondholders agreed to take a 70 per cent “haircut.”

But not our cantor of deuda, Mr Singer, and his fellow billionaires — who used the U.S. justice system to force Argentina to pay in full, as he has done to developing countries like Peru and Democratic Republic of Congo.

The trouble, as both Forbes magazine has written — and Shakespeare implied in The Merchant of Venice — arrives when the client cannot pay, and when even the justice system is weaponised against one side or the other.

Corporations can escape their debt relatively easily: they declare bankruptcy or fold the company and begin again with a clean sheet. Countries are not allowed a debt jubilee. They are in hock, even as the vulture tears at their flesh.

Inflammatory? Not really, because the venture capitalists have not only the courts, but also the IFIs on their side.

In 2018 the IMF loaded Argentina with the biggest loan in history — $57 billion — to help a right wing candidate Mauricio Macri in the 2019 election. Although Macri lost, $44 billion was disbursed, and used by Macri’s oligarch allies to sell their Argentine assets, converting their pesos into USD — the IMF justified its actions as the massive exchange of currency helped stabilise the Argentine peso.

What could be the answer? Perhaps a regional currency.

Lula da Silva in Brazil supports creating a regional currency for trade, to reduce dependence on the dollar, and 24 countries have joined or expressed desire to join the BRICS, an informal economic alliance pioneered by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Javier Milei takes an opposite approach: arguing that adopting the U.S. dollar would stabilise the economy.

The economist Ha-Joon Chang, author of Kicking Away The Ladder (2002), points out that the Western powers got rich through restrictive trade practices: free trade is something they reserve for the colonies they exploit.

On a visit to Argentina he said if it adopts the dollar the country might as well apply to be a colony, as its macro-economic policy is controlled from Washington DC. [1]

Milei recognises that shock therapy requires military suppression. This is an echo of president Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Ukraine.

Without sovereignty over its currency, Argentina will be in the position of southern Europe during the Eurozone crisis: forced into austerity, selling off assets to pay off debt — but at the cost of a collapse in employment and GDP. This means that the burden of debt, relative to national output, actually rises over time.

Chicago boys

It's not a coincidence that Javier Milei's 1970-style sideburns and rockstar hair disguise his admiration for Gen Augusto Pinochet who came to power in a 1973 coup, orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency under U.S. president Richard Nixon.

Like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who congratulated Melei on his victory, he sees tough medicine as the only way out of crisis.

I remember during the British premiership of Margaret Thatcher when Pinochet was held up as a champion of business-friendly government and excused his brutal methods.

Before the libertarians, the popular economic orthodoxy among conservative youth who were interested in economics, was monetarism. Milton Friedman’s followers, the Chicago Boys, would play a key role in Argentina.

Restricting the money supply to bring down inflation led to high unemployment. The economist Richard Werner, pioneer of quantitative easing, argues that monetarism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between inflation, interest rates and growth. Leave that for another article.

Cue Israel

Israel was used, via the 1973 war, to weaponise oil, jack up the price, create the petrodollar and, finally, to kill the gold standard. The result, over the next three decades, was the deindustrialisation of much of the Western world.

Simultaneously China was brought into the totally not-free Western-controlled trade system. Were trade truly free, there would be no logical need for a nation to be “admitted.”

In a sleight of hand, and manipulative word play, the oiler-bankers and lords of the Opium Wars, who got rich through restrictive practices, would allow China to undercut Western industry.

The objective was to transform society in a way that would allow the rich to use their control of energy and resources to create a post-industrial society, which we now see presented in the guise of The Great Reset, while the no-longer-needed industrial workforce is reduced in the guise of Climate Change.

As for Pinochet, a Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón issued an arrest warrant for Pinochet in 1998, and he was held under house arrest in London for one year and a half, before the British government allowed him to fly home to Chile where he died before he was convicted.

Basket case?