ContraSOLa: A Message from Argentina: Our Sympathies to the People of Greece!

A Message from Argentina: Our Sympathies to the People of Greece!
by Adrian Salbuchi*

There are disconcerting parallels between Argentina’s catastrophic decade, 1991-2001, which ended in massive default, and Greece’s recent and impending difficulties. In both cases, international credit organisations
were to blame and both countries were beset by widespread protests and riots over austerity measures imposed by the IMF. Argentinian economist Adrián Salbuchi offers a hard-hitting analysis of this engineered crisis which knows no boundaries.


A woman gives the V sign as she holds a banner reading ’Greece is not for sale, Long Live Greece, Long Live Theodorakis’, during a demonstration next to the Greek embassy in Buenos Aires on May 12, 2010, in support of Greek trade unions, which called for a general strike against government budget cuts.

When Argentinians watch the news today and see the terrible things that are happening in Greece, we cannot but say, “Hey!! This is EXACTLY like Argentina in December 2001 and beginning of 2002…!”. Then too, Argentina underwent its worst systemic banking, public debt and monetary collapse which led to social turmoil, mad violence, rioting, and social war. The turmoil was so bad, that it forced then president Fernando de la Rúa’s government to resign, especially because of his notorious pro-banker cartel economy minister, Domingo Cavallo, generating a political vacuum that led to Argentina having 5 (five!!) presidents in that terrible last week of December 2001. What triggered social chaos in Argentina was the attempt by president De la Rúa to implement the grossly unjust austerity measures imposed by the IMF that required, as usual, utmost sacrifice from the people – more taxes, less social spending, “balanced budgets”, zero deficit spending, amongst other anti-social measures – which led to a fall of almost 40% in Argentina’s GDP. Half of all Argentinians fell below the poverty line (most were never to make it back to the traditional Argentina middle class), private banks were allowed to legally retain everybody’s savings, US dollar deposits were arbitrarily changed into Pesos at whatever rate of exchange the government and bankers decided (the dollar was devalued 300% from one peso to the dollar, to 4 pesos the dollar in just weeks) and yet…. Not one bank fell!!! Indeed, since then they’re all back in “business as usual”, however the poor and impoverished are today totally out of business… Throughout 25 years of successive caretaker governments in Argentina, the IMF-led Global Banking Cartel artificially generated a basically illegal – or at best, illegitimate – Sovereign Debt that grew so huge, that it ended up collapsing the entire financial and economic system. That was no coincidence. It was part of a highly complex model, engineered to control entire countries, through a cycle having sequential stages and identifiable parts that has one basic overriding goal: when the finance economy is fueled to run in an artificial “growth mode”, the bulk of all profits are privatized into the hands of their “friends”, managers and operators. However, when the whole scheme – like all Ponzi schemes - reaches its climax and total collapse is at hand, they revert the process and then socialize all losses. (See video “Global Financial Collapse”, Parts 1 and 2, below.) That’s what Mr. Cavallo - a Rockefeller protégé - achieved, ensuring that the Argentine people bore all the losses, whilst the international banksters took all the profits. The mainstream media – both global and local – willingly obliged; The New York Times went so far as to suggest that the entire Patagonian region (i.e., the 5 southern provinces of Argentina accounting for 35% of Argentina’s territory and having immeasurable energy, mining, foodstuff, water resource wealth), should secede from the rest of the country as a way of “resolving our foreign debt woes…” Now, that was Argentina 2001/2002 but, isn’t that also the case when today’s US taxpayer bails out Goldman Sachs, AIG, CitiCorp and GM whilst losing his house, pension and job? Isn’t that what is happening to Greece today? And Iceland? And the UK? And Ireland? And – anytime soon – Spain? Portugal? Italy…? In Argentina, our people ended up getting used to being much poorer, so when “normal” times returned, the Goldman Sachs and Citicorp controlled local media were able to ensure that a new puppet regime subservient to the money interests should come to power: i.e., the husband and wife pro-banking mafia team of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner… And the merry-go-round keeps turning and turning, whilst the Argentine people keep paying and paying… Today, we look at Greece and see the same tell-tale signs: the IMF imposing strict austerity measures as a condition for the banks to lend more money to them (as if a country collapsing under the burden of debt can overcome that by getting into even more debt!!), the mainstream media speaking vociferously on the need for “Greece to do things correctly and responsibly” (as if the US FED, the Bank of England, Goldman Sachs and the US Treasury, Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson, Brown, Geithner, Blankfein, Greenberg were examples of responsible accountability), local caretaker governments doing all they can on behalf of banking interests (George Papandreou is a regular at the Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission meetings, as was Fernando de la Rúa, a founding member of the local chapter of the Council on Foreign Relations in Argentina called CARI), major banks such as Goldman Sachs trying to collect their pound of flesh in the midst of all the turmoil and hardship; all of this against a backdrop of desperate citizens taking to the streets to express what is obvious to all: that international bankers and local caretaker government form a complex association of thieves and robbers. The inevitable then occurs: the Government sends the police out to the streets to protect the bankers, themselves and New World Order power elite interests... Then violence flares up, people get hurt and die…. The poor (police) battle against the poor (population), whilst the rich look on from a safe distance with a chuckle… Make no mistake: this is a Global Model. Make no mistake: there is NO democracy, not even in Athens, its birthplace. What we people suffer the world over – be it in Greece, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Indonesia, or Spain, or Iceland, or the US or the UK - is a mechanical mass vote-counting system, that is totally dependent on huge quantities of money, necessary to finance costly political campaigns, purchase radio, TV and press coverage, pay for grotesque political party structures, journalists, analysts, and of course to pay for the well-marketed candidates themselves: that vast array of decrepit stooges we read about in the papers every day: Bush, Blair, Papandreou, Obama, Clinton, Menem, Kirchner, Lula, Uribe, Sarkozy, Rodriguez Zapatero, Merkel... What we have is a “democracy” that is totally subservient to money, however we need to understand that money is NOT democratic (nor should it be). Money is controlled by the mega-Banking structure that uses the IMF, World Bank, FED, BIS, ECB as its global regulating entities, and pays to run the whole “Democracy Show”. Ergo, we end up having “the best democracy that money can buy”... which is no Democracy at all... The results of this could be tragically seen in Argentina, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, yesterday; in Greece, Iceland, the US and the UK, today... So, who’s next? Spain?, Italy? Portugal? Will the European Monetary System just blow up to pieces? A 750 Billion Euro Bail-out will send the recently born (still in diapers) Euro into a tailspin… Will the European Monetary Mechanism fall apart? Will Germany be the first to revert to the gold old Deutsch-Mark? Will the collapsing Euro and the technically hyper-inflated US Dollar (Shhh! Don’t say that aloud!!) pave the way for a new, essentially private Global Currency to be managed on a planetary scale by the private money cartel of the Goldman Sach’s, HSBC’s, CitCorp’s, Deutsche Bank’s of this world? Stay tuned… There is much, much more to come…