The Wall Street Journal’s Coup Mentality

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/231591/the-wall-street-journals-coup-mentality/

The Wall Street Journal’s Coup Mentality
Publico, Spain
By Emir Sader
Translated By Jenny Westwell
26 January 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer

~snip~

This is the confusing part. The alarming depiction of the situation in Buenos Aires is not referring to the calamities the country suffered after the collapse of former president Carlos Menem’s neoliberal economic model, which pegged the Argentine peso one-to-one to the U.S. dollar and was praised to the skies by both the IMF and The Wall Street Journal itself. At that time, the massive expropriation of the Argentine population by the banking system took the country to the lowest point in its history; Eric Hobsbawm makes the comparison with Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Hitherto, unimaginable scenes were witnessed in Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina. A country that had previously enjoyed periods of full employment was subjected to the highest joblessness levels it had ever seen, and Buenos Aires experienced the worst moments of its history, as wide swaths of the middle classes descended into poverty, and homelessness became widespread. It was a scenario indescribably worse than that described by The Wall Street Journal correspondent.

Néstor Kirchner, followed by Cristina, set out from the worst recession ever experienced by the Argentine economy and successfully steered the country to social and economic recovery and a high level of development. They achieved this despite the woeful legacy of poverty, social exclusion, de-industralization, and privatization of state-owned companies, which began with the petroleum company YPF.

Ten years of systematic recovery of the economy have brought about the greatest economic growth in Latin America and radically reduced unemployment, allowing the Kirchners to win three consecutive presidential elections. In spite of this, the correspondent writes of the Kirchners’ destruction of the nation's wealth. Clearly, the Buenos Aires of the "cartoneros" [trash pickers] escaped her notice. The "cartonero" phenomenon followed the collapse of the suicidal neoliberal policies so lavishly praised by The Wall Street Journal, with marginalized people, the middle class included, streaming into the capital to salvage anything they could find to sell, recycle or use.

The tendency in the columns of press organs like these is to turn everything on its head. The Carlos Menem and Fernando de la Rúa governments, which destroyed the nation’s wealth, are depicted as those that created and increased it. The Kirchner governments, which have brought the nation back from the brink, are depicted as those that destroyed that wealth.