MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
“The camp is no longer a tame cow to be milked” warn Argentine farmers
Argentine farmers said on Saturday that the camp is “no longer a tame cow to be milked” by a “predatory government” and blasted “inefficiency and wrong policies”. Read full article
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Disclaimer & comment rulesUh Oh. Mrs. K, the teet has gone dry. Maybe you and Nestor should kick in a few million of your ill gotten gains to help the poor..
Aug 02nd, 2009 - 05:38 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Bubba -- I am observing politics in Argentina from afar. I havent been able to figure out the common thread, if there is one, that runs through all the various political factions that call themselves Peronist. Any thoughts?
Aug 05th, 2009 - 10:12 am - Link - Report abuse 0Best,
Randy Schaeffer
randyschaeffer@gmail.com
Randy, I am expat from Texas, living in Dubai, after having lived in Argentina for 6 years and Latin America for 14. This is a Texans' take on what happened to Argentina.
Aug 05th, 2009 - 11:57 am - Link - Report abuse 0Part 1
Anyone can call themselves a Peronist, invoking in a rather melacholy way, ofl ife before the Perons trashed the economy, when Argentina was the 5th largest economy on the planet, putting them in the terms of today, on par with France. Of course this was after WWII but they had been in the top ten prior, manufacturing agribusiness, science and technology. They developed and exported the first metro busses, built Fords and Chevies that were exported to Europe and the rest of South America. Had mature petrochemical industry, paper, mining, etc. Then along comes the militay juntas and other left overs from the crapped out political and judicial systems selected after the Spanish left. Now, Peron ascends to the presidency through hook, crook or arm twisting and procedes to loot the national treasury in the name of social empowerment, sending loads of it to Swiss bank accounts, and starts the country and economy on a downward spiral of subsidies to the “pueblo”. This is like what the Spanish did to the indigenous populations throughout the region. Give them just enough food to survive, subsidized energy, housing etc. Let this system mature for 50 years and it evolves into self propagating generations of folks without motivation to do anything or achieve anything other than playing football for River or Boca...
Part 2
Aug 05th, 2009 - 12:09 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Fast forward from all the “Don't Cry for Me” stuff. Democracy prevails for a while, they have some elected politicians, but still the good ole boy system of corruption is rife. The system of government is federalist, meaning all taxes are collected provincial governments to be distributed by the central government in BsAs. However, everytime someone touches this money there is a small bite taken from it, “mordida”. Because bribery and corruption laws are not enforced, this is business as usual.
Now getting back to the Peron thing. While they were gleefully depleting the treasury Peronist like Eva would visit schools, where young plible minds reside. Some candy near Christmas, a pair of shoes one year, a propaganda book another. These young impressionalble minds remember this the rest of their lives and tell their children of how good things were. Now, you have the sindicatos, labour unions and unions of unions that push through an agenda that all but kills business in Argentina. You cant reduce headcount in times of recession or fire anyone. If you release them, you continue to pay their salary until they find another job. Jobs for life, and this has killed off many small businesses because the government would rather see you go out of business rather than upset the sindicatos.
Now to make a short story just a little longer.. Peronism can best be described as a system that wants capatilism to work so it can be robbed of the ability to grow while paying off people to not work, who have been bred to be dependent on the government. Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you...
Again just a take from an expat that has the luxury of sitting back and lamenting that the Argentines continue to vote with their hearts and passions rather than there heads.
Bubba, you are not quite right, Peron had good things and bad things, among good things, he implemented many modern policies, right to vote for women, strategic view of industrial Self-sufficient, long term economics policies, things that made Argentines think in a long term of development. He gave else rights to workers that were used in foreign developed nations.
Aug 06th, 2009 - 12:48 am - Link - Report abuse 0Before Peron, Argentina's society was developed, but it offered an agricultural economy, which was fine at the time becouse it was well paid,but was suffering loses on prices. Peron developed industry having in mind a more independent nation, (dont forget Argentina's Infrastructure had a strong influence of british capitals while Argentina was a british creditor).
Among the bad things, Peron implemented a repulsive indoctrination like for example they teached kids to read from their first textbook “Evita loves me” instead of “my mom loves me” as the kid first words. He eliminated political adversaries, dividing the nation between peronist and the rest of citizens with different views calling them “gorilas”. He named an Incapable woman as his vicepresident called Isabel only becouse she was his wife.
After Peron, Argentina's political parties, never offered a long term long-standing development plan.
After Peron dies, military regimes destroyed almost all that was made during Peron government, mostly good things like aeronautical development buying hundred of aircrafts to a foreign nation having the capacity and a finished prototipe beign developed in Cordoba, heavy factories, medical and space industry, research facilities...
Succesives governments who aligned themself to peron's partie like Menem, Duhalde, Kirchner never actually did, ideaologically speaking, any of the Peron economics measures for the development of the economy, to the contrary, they applied neoliberals measures, So instead of learn and apply the good legacy that Peron left us, they applied the wrong vicious attitude of increasing its own pocket.
Luis,
Aug 06th, 2009 - 12:32 pm - Link - Report abuse 0I agree with most of what you have said, but underneath, Peron was and would have been described as a nationalist socialist, as he admired the Nazi Party and Franco in Spain. He used the Germans to develop Pulqui, and bankrupt the nation feeding the “heavy water fusion reactor” project in Bariloche. He was bent on domination of Latin America and would have developed nukes given more time and stolen mony for the agribusiness. He had portraits of Hitler and Franco in the Casa Rosada and in the military schools and acadamies. However you spin him, I think the bad he did has outweighed all the good. Look at how Argentina has languished in the hopes of recapturing the “good ole days” of Juan and Eva, as they are remembered through clouded eyes and hearts that yearn for the times that everyone thinks were so much better.
Bubba, Peron was not the only one that took germans tecnitians to make aircrafts or nuclear bombs, the US did, the soviets did, and i think britain did it too, so i dont see that wrong, he was oportunist in that matter that helped Argentine industry.
Aug 07th, 2009 - 08:19 am - Link - Report abuse 0About domination, he didnt wanted to dominate Latin America, at the contrary, he wanted the political and economic integration with Chile and Brasil to conter the north influence in the region. He wanted independence of Latin America from the influence of any foreign nation. The pact was called ABC.
About the portraits you mention, i never heard anything like that, i can only guess he was a fascist more not too different of Churchill before the war (no offend).
Anyway i agree with you that the bad things he did outweighed all the good. Just thinking in names like Menem, Duhalde, Kirchner, Macri, De Narvaez makes me wish that Peron should had never existed.
For clear reasons im not a Peronist, nor antiperonist, i try to be impartial and fair becouse it should be good for our nation to establish for once long-term policies, to stop with improvisations policies, Peron had a view beyond his term, i dont think any of our polititians now had any idea of what to expect tomorrow.
Luis,
Aug 10th, 2009 - 04:55 am - Link - Report abuse 0Churchill spent his political wilderness years pre-war accused of what McCarthy called premature anti-fascism. He highlighted the dangers of Nazism long before anyone else. Check your facts.
Justin, well i checked my sources, and i still se some similarities between them:
Aug 10th, 2009 - 08:18 am - Link - Report abuse 0Churchill looked upon the nazis with unbounded approval. In the 1939 edition of Great Contemporaries, Winston Churchill wrote about Hitler's rise to power:
“The Story of that Struggle cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, the vital force which enabled him to challenge, defy, conciliate, or overcome, all authorities or resistance which barred his path…I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war, I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations.” (The same book by Churchill contains a venomous attack on Trotsky, who earns his bitter hatred as builder of the Red Army and one of the leaders of the October revolution - EG)
When Mussolini was subjecting the Italian working class to his castor oil 'treatments' and other bestial tortures, Churchill became deeply impressed with his 'gentle and simple bearing'. Speaking in Rome on 20 January, 1927, Churchill found only praise for the fascists:
“I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by Signor Mussolini's gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers. Secondly, anyone could see that he thought of nothing but the lasting good, as he understood it, of the Italian people, and that no lesser interest was of the slightest consequence to him. If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. I will, however, say a word on an international aspect of fascism. Externally, your movement has rendered service to the whole world. The great fear which has always beset every democratic leader or a working class leader has been that of being undermined by someone more extreme than he. Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of civilised society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of Bolshevism.”
By 1937 he had gone on to explain in a little more detail his views on the worth of subject peoples in his submission to the Palestine Commission, arguing:
Quote:
I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
When in 1942 the popular Quit India Movement threatened to disrupt the war effort, it was brutally put down with public shootings and mass whippings, torturing of protesters and burning of villages, leading even bourgeois observers to make comparisons with 'Nazi dreadfulness'. When in 1943 food shortages began as a direct result of British scorched earth policies, the War Cabinet ignored the problem, refusing to stop ordering Indian food abroad in the interests of the war effort. The resulting man-made famine in Bengal may have accounted for as many as four million deaths.
Churchill charming response when asked about this was to castigate the Indian people for:
Quote:
Breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing by us about the war.
oh and by the way, churchill called Gandhi a “half naked fakir”.
http://libcom.org/blog/the-peccadillos-winston-churchill-12082008
http://libcom.org/blog/the-peccadillos-winston-churchill-12082008o/inmobiliaria/politica/98160-palabras-de-churchill-alabando-hitler-y-mussolinni-o-la-naturaleza-del-fascismo.html
http://libcom.org/blog/the-peccadillos-winston-churchill-12082008
Luis,
Aug 11th, 2009 - 05:18 am - Link - Report abuse 0I'm genuinely astonished that you would not only post the most ludicrous links to utter nonsense but fail to notice the very links your are posting actually contain a very effective rebuttal of the very accusations you think they support. Clearly you didn't read them.
Again my point remains, you just fail to do the most basic due dilligence in checking your facts you merely select whatever reinforces your beliefs. More than anything you've ever posted you've utterly undermined what little credibility you had.
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