From Argentina To A Street Near You

A crisis born of elite conceit is about to be exported around the world

New economy minister takes control of agriculture, industry and trade.
Centralizing government, straight out of Rockefeller-WEF playbook.
Super-minister will try to ‘interconnect’ his way out of trouble.

Argentina’s rolling crises have local roots and managed outcomes.
Personalities like Christine Lagarde and the late Peter Sutherland heave into view.
Agendas combine across nations; as objectives converge they expose their authors.

So-called “free trade” is a tool for control in Latin America’s 2nd biggest country.
Global compacts GATT, WTO & TTIP constrain and centralize economic activity.
Argentina, like Canada, is facing the further appropriation of resources.

World poverty more than halved in the past 40 years, despite Klaus Schwab’s claims.
Yet Europeans are less equal than 40 years ago — a flawed euro and centralization.
Globalists use crises to fit their pre-planned solution: poverty is a tool of control.

(About 4,500 words or roughly 20 minutes’ of your time. If you do not receive the full post in your email, please follow the link to the website. Thank you.)

See also:

Argentina’s President-Elect Milei Is An Enigma - Until you look at his WEF, Wallenberg and HSBC connections (Nov 20, 2023)

“U.S. Initiates State Control Of Food Supply - Coincides with 60th anniversary of Soviet massacre over meat shortages” (May 20, 2022)

Protestors denounce the IMF deal, demand action on jobs and inflation — Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires’ financial district on Aug 11, 2022

Aug 16, 2022

Drums pound the beat of protest in Argentina but they don’t convey the raw anger of the traditional cacerolazo, a raucous clatter of pots and pans.

Bongos appear nowadays wherever two or more hipsters are gathered, and they sound strangely cheery, more suited to the billionaire-funded color revolutions than a grassroots uprising. [1]

That’s not by accident. You can be sure the globalists have their feet on the ground and will bend this crisis to their will — if they didn’t create it on purpose.

The circumstances of the $56 billion loan in 2018 leave a deliberate crisis open to consideration. This was not simply the doing of inept local politicians. The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) own report admits it failed to fully assess the causes of inflation; moreover it handed over the money in a sloppy fashion which may have assisted theft and accelerated the collapse of the peso. You would have thought this was the IMF’s bread and butter.

The deal was overseen by Christine Lagarde, then head of the IMF, and now president of the European Central Bank (more on whom after the paywall).

This broadens the picture, and invites us to look at a global policies. It touches on the division of the world into trade blocs. Although he died in 2018, one of our guides on this tour is the late Peter Sutherland, formerly head of everything — Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, Goldman Sachs, the UN migrant project, and one of the top appointees at the European Commission.

Man of the moment

Argentina’s new economy minister, Sergio Massa, an intermittent WEF attendee, has merged three ministries into one, turning himself into a super minister in charge of agriculture and productive development.

As leader of the Peronist Frente Renovador he is in the ruling coalition and also leads the lower chamber, the Cámara de Diputados. Massa has taken control of finance, agriculture, industry and trade. There’s not much of the economy beyond his grasp.

That’s basically what the World Economic Forum (WEF) sees as its remit, rolled into one. During the Covid response, governments centralized power like crazy. The fusion doctrine has been particularly evident in Western governments: the combining of departments into one executive force — for example, health, policing, surveillance and the biosecurity state.

Long considered a presidential candidate, Massa is a seen as pushy by colleagues but his persistence “allowed him to construct the image of a ‘savior’ that is the only one capable of getting the country out of the critical mess it’s in,” writes the Buenos Aires Times, referring to the Fernández administration as a “slow-motion train-wreck.” [2]

Domestic politicians are wedded to globalist “free market” policies that are anything but. In a society dominated by huge wealth entrenched in relatively few hands, markets will not be free but tend towards corporativism on the one hand, and the over-riding of national interest on the other.

Argentina has faced an energy crisis for two decades, caused by serial devaluations, a failure to increase prices, and instability that puts off investors. Once energy self-sufficient, it has spent precious foreign reserves to import energy. Only when sanctions on Russia hit imports did it revive a plan to link the Vaca Muerta shale fields to the capital Buenos Aires with a 1,000 km pipeline.

Restoring order

Although Massa has appointed new faces to his super ministry, a significant policy coordination has not yet emerged.

He wants to accelerate exports by incentivizing food producers to empty their freezers and silos, with a special exchange rate that gives them more pesos to the dollar.

But he also wants citizens to hold pesos not dollars. To do that he has to keep interest rates higher than annualized inflation. Both stand at about 70 per cent. Last week alone, interest rates were hiked almost 10 per cent. In comparison Mexico’s annual inflation rate jumped to 8.15 per cent in July, closer to that seen across the West.

Cuts to social spending and ending energy subsidies, do not help rebuild foreign reserves. The IMF is insisting on a fiscal deficit (the excess of government spending over income as a measure of gross domestic product) of 2.5 per cent this year, falling to 1.9 next and 0.9 in 2024. To achieve this Massa has frozen government jobs and limited the printing of money. That implies further harsh falls in living standards.

Matías Vernengo, economics professor at Bucknell University, said it seemed Massa is betting on an inflow of foreign money from sovereign wealth funds or banks [presumably in return for a claim on public assets – Ed.] That would significantly depress the peso. “That would be a mistake in my view,” he told Courthouse News. [3]

Meanwhile, people resort to barter, seeking to exchange clothes for food. Half the people surveyed by Buenos Aires University's psychology department said a drastic decline in their fortunes meant their outlook is bleak. Before the crisis Argentina had 222 psychologists per 100,000 people, against 49 in France and 30 in the U.S. (WHO).

The banker network

This crisis has it all: international bankers influencing elections; the IMF billions finding their way into private bank accounts; foreign exchange trading screens lighting up as the cash flees the country; and the ordinary people stuck with the bill.

The IMF has followed the same shtick for decades: lend more money in return for austerity and the sale of public assets (to globalists close to the IMF) and pinning the debt on the public. It is a form of wealth distribution to the richest.

While it appears to sit at the top of the United Nations pile, the IMF is below the Bank for International Settlements in the pecking order. In 2018 BIS general manager Agustín Carstens told the IMF it if didn’t have enough money to handle multiple emerging market crises, “others will have to do it.”[4]

The IMF presumes to control the world’s monetary system but it acts as an “enforcer” for the BIS, founded in 1930 by the Bank of England when it was still in private hands, along with the Reichsbank and private U.S. interests. The World Bank, a development bank, is the UN tool to shape domestic policy within countries.

Roots of the crisis

Argentina suffered a devastating crisis in 2000-2002 that almost wiped out its middle class. Yet its ruling elite eagerly repeated the same mistakes, taking a record loan from the IMF in 2018 of more than $56 billion.

Fernanda Vallejos, writing in The Intercept, in March 2022, said the loan was made in the run-up to a presidential election, negotiated in secret and, according to former economy minister Martín Guzmán, political influence was the IMF’s intent. Guzmán said the U.S. representatives on the IMF board admitted they aimed to secure the election of “business friendly” candidate Mauricio Macri. When he lost, the incoming Peronist president Alberto Fernández was stuck with the loan. [5]

The IMF conceded that the “assistance” was poorly executed and failed in its objectives. It had neglected to understand the multiple causes of inflation, which had shot to 40 per cent in 2016, partly due to shortages and supply chain frictions. Yet it stuck to the familiar prescription: zero deficit in 2019 meaning more austerity as the country headed into a downturn.

The central bankers already knew they were going to reset the monetary system: a lockdown freezing small and mid-sized businesses, while creating trillions of dollars and channeling them directly to favoured corporations.

Although it would not happen until the pandemic, they would green-light the plan at the bankers’ retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2019. The project had already been prepared by big-three asset manager BlackRock. So they knew what was in the works at the time the loan was signed with Argentina. [6]

The enforcers

Is Argentina to blame? It borrowed the money. It must pay it back. David Graeber recalls a cocktail party discussion with a Western lawyer in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years (2021). Despite working for an activist NGO, the lawyer knew little of the history of the IMF, how it acts as a middleman for wealthy countries seeking to lend out their money, often to dictators or corrupt regimes; how as a “debt enforcer” in Graeber’s words, the IMF demands the money back from the mouths of babes, often in the form of cuts to public services, heath and education.

If you think this is exaggeration, the foremost economist on central banks, Richard Werner, is more damning than Graeber. He chronicles in The Princes Of The Yen (2003) how the IMF and World Bank manipulated compliant Japanese officials to “open up” the country, encouraging it to borrow money from abroad. That led to the boom of the 1980s. When the U.S. hiked interest rates boom turned to bust — pump and dump — and the IMF enforcers moved in for the kill, demanding Japan and other Asian countries sell their financial institutions to Western bankers as the price of assistance.

The Greek example

Naomi Wolf in her latest book, The Bodies Of Others (2022) describes a dinner party at which bankers and finance capitalists bemoaned how the Greek population in 2015 voted against the six years of austerity that the European Commission had imposed as part of the EU’s debt crisis (which continues to this day).

“Greeks shouldn’t have borrowed money they cannot repay,” was the chorus. This ignored the fact that the European Commission’s single currency, the euro, was flawed from the outset, with a single interest rate for all members, regardless of vastly different economic conditions, and the lack of a central treasury to coordinate if not control government borrowing.

Before the launch of the euro, governments were asked to report their spending commitments relative to income. Greece massaged its figure with the help of globalist bank Goldman Sachs, which helped it hide several billions of foreign debt. Goldman’s chairman at the time was the late Peter Sutherland, a former European Commissioner. The team that massaged the Greek numbers was led by Goldman’s current CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.

Can anyone at the the top of Goldman Sachs or the EC say with a straight face that they did not know? That signing up to an unworkable project was the fault of the Greek people?

The euro was launched with a single interest rate, representing a massive reduction for poorer countries from Ireland and Portugal to Spain and Greece. It kicked off a boom that benefited Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse, Germany, and the northern European banks. The rate of Mercedes-Benz ownership, per capita, reached its highest in Greece and Ireland.

That was only the first act in the play. The second act was to collect the money. The third act is in progress and is related to parallel globalist agendas.

Giant sucking sound

The European Central Bank acted as debt enforcer for Austrian, German and French banks who called in collateral across southern Europe. The European Union, sold to the population on the basis that it would equalize living standards, turned into a “giant sucking sound,” to quote U.S. critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Ross Perot.

He was describing the hollowing out of American industry, as proponents of shareholder value chased the cheapest labour around the globe. In Europe as Portugal’s shoemakers, for example, lost their jobs to China, investors and skilled workers sought a haven in the north.

Eurozone countries have moved further apart, not closer together. A study by World Inequality Database found that Europeans are less equal, between countries and within countries. “As a result of a limited convergence process and rising inequality within countries, Europeans are more unequal today than four decades ago.”

Northern European countries are 50 per cent richer than the European average and southern countries have been declining relatively to the continental average since the 1990s and are now 10 per cent below the average. Incomes in eastern Europe are no closer to those in the West than they were after the fall of the Soviet Union. [7]

The economist Joseph Stiglitz observed in 2016, “The euro has failed to achieve either of its two principal goals of prosperity and political integration: these goals are now more distant than they were before the creation of the Eurozone.” [8]

At the risk of saying, “told you so,” I was a reporter at Reuters news agency during the launch of the euro in 1999. We knew the lack of a single treasury to regulate spending across the Eurozone risked disaster. We were specifically instructed not to report on a plan B. The euro project would go ahead regardless.

Could the European single currency have been flawed on purpose? It sounds ridiculous until you look at parallel globalist projects which seem to have a common source and objective.

Culture and politics

As a student at the Wine & Spirit Education Trust, I once tried to contact a winemaker in Mendoza. After several attempts I called a friend in the business in Chile and asked if he could raise a response. “Ah, he said. We might take a siesta in the hammock but in Argentina they put on their pajamas.”

Like Greece, Argentina’s plight is partly rooted in attitudes as politics is downstream of culture.

The late historian Carl E. Solberg compared the agrarian economies of Argentina and Canada which began from a similar position in the 19th century. He noted that a large number of small farmers enriched and energized Canada, while the small number of huge landholdings in Argentina stagnated and declined. What’s more, they influenced the political climate.

The Argentine state, run by an elite of massive ranch owners, insisted “the free and unregulated operation of market economics would bring the fastest possible development to Argentina.” [9]

In Argentina, the Spanish empire it escaped in 1810 bequeathed aristocratic landowners on huge estates. Immigrant farmers from southern Europe were granted only short-term tenancies and, not owning anything [but happy ™WEF] lacked the commitment to develop the land.

Canada’s selective immigration policy favoured northern Europeans. With the knack of teasing wealth from a patchwork of small farms, these Belgian, Dutch, French and British migrants brought centuries of farming know-how. Perhaps they were more used to civic engagement — Canada’s family farms were in a better position to influence policy, build cooperatives, insist on infrastructure and protectionism. Canada’s prarie farmers became world-beating exporters.

Solberg demolishes the myth that the only path to prosperity is free trade agreements and deregulation at the risk of consolidation and monopoly, run by “business friendly” presidents in the name of the rules-based international order.

The agenda

Free trade and removing the obstacles to (Western) capital finance is always the stated objective, whether it is couched in the words of eliminating barriers, global governance, the Rockefeller buzzword of interconnectedness or Soros equity.

The matter is not “free trade” — for that is a slogan — but what the policy means in practice. Take the development of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which was a set of principles. When it was replaced, contracting parties became members of a governing institution, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Then the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) set global rules for trade — German minister for economic affairs Sigmar Gabriel called TTIP “a lever that allows us to steer globalisation."

Some researchers say the TTIP is about allocating market share to trade blocs such as the EU or the Americas. It represents another retreat from multilateralism. Anything but free trade, you see.

And who is “us.” If it is the EC and U.S who insist on higher environmental standards (and consequently, production costs) how do they avoid losing market share — why, by controlling it. “The creation of blocs implies that countries will be treated less equally in the future.” [10]

Thus in globalist parlance, the setting of rules is called “liberalisation” and “liberalisation will not be extended to all WTO members automatically; rather, it will be limited to certain trade partners” and developing countries that can’t keep up with liberalisation will be excluded.

Cast of characters

There is no need to speculate whether these objectives are connected. They are connected in one man and you could not miss him.

Corpulent and corporativist, the late Peter Sutherland personified the globalist network and its projects. If anyone knew, from above the fray, how all the pieces fit together it was he who sat on Bilderberg Group’s steering committee, was honorary chairman of the Trilateral Commission, was the UN’s global champion of migration, and founding head of the World Trade Organization. It was in the latter role that I interviewed Sutherland in 1995 at his offices at Goldman Sachs on London’s Fleet Street.

“Peter Sutherland is a unique case; a pasha of world fuzzy democracy, a knight of the British realm described in the Financial Times in 2009 as “at the centre of the establishment in all its forms”, a querulous and basilisk Buddha, looking down from a great height at the mortals of the world and their fig-leaves of democracy and national sovereignty, barriers to the elevation of trade that his career has so eminently promoted.” [11]

Sutherland famously called on EU states not to be biased towards “highly skilled” migrants, but to accept anyone regardless of their abilities: “We still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others, and that is precisely what the European Union should be doing its best to undermine.” [12]

This is a curious twist on migration. Sutherland presents it as a matter of human rights that the country should neither select the migrant — nor have any position to offer him — but that the latter should choose any country regardless (I write “he” purposely as most economic migrants are for some reason single males.)

Britain is the root of this policy. For decades it has enticed migrants to seek jobs it didn’t have. The faster the north of Britain deindustrialised, the more it invited families from rural Southeast Asia — a dishonest proposition. The alienation of inner city youth is, arguably, the not-unintentional result of bureaucrats since it comports with Sutherland’s instruction.

Perhaps you disagree, or maybe you see the same policy now rolled out in the U.S..

Whatever position you take — on the single currency, or the mismatch between the outsourcing of industry and import of unskilled labour — the character of Peter Sutherland connects the dots for us. For these policies are linked in him.

These objectives — the sophistry of so-called “free trade,” the trap in which Argentina is caught, the attempt to throttle the farmers of Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, Canada, Britain and the U.S., the deindustrialisation, the fraudulent offer to migrants of a welfare state soon to vanish, the manipulation of the domestic population, and Sutherland’s open admission that the objective is to undermine homogeneity and national sovereignty — all this is damning enough but it is not all.

Look more closely and you spot that these are only station stops, waypoints. They are not the terminus nor the objective.

Those who look down “from a great height” know exactly how these different policies interleave, as cogs mesh when gears turn.

When corrupt politicians and bankers conspire in financial shenanigans — from which they profit before passing the tab to the people — can you really believe that the international governmental institutions are independent?

What does this tell us about The Great Reset?