http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT3OHF50APC&live=true
It assumes that the US tends only to act to bail out military allies - I wonder if that is true?
And then this choice excerpt from Paul Krugman (who also mentions Japan) in today's NYT:
"And then, of course, there's Argentina. What's shocking about the political and economic crisis there is not so much its severity — though it is amazing to see the punishment now being inflicted on a country that just three years ago was the toast of Wall Street — as how gratuitous it is. We're talking about a government whose debt really isn't very large compared with the size of its national economy, and whose fairly modest budget deficit is entirely the product of an economic slump, forced into drastic spending cuts that will further worsen that slump. It wouldn't be tolerated here — but the bankers in New York tell the Argentines that they have no alternative. And Washington — not the Bush administration, which has been eerily silent as Argentina melts down, but the conservative think tanks that helped the country bind itself in a monetary straitjacket — agrees.
Does it have to be this way? Is Keynesianism good only for the U.S. and selected other Western countries, but out of bounds for everyone else? Maybe..." Well, hell yeah, Paul, ain't that what its all about?
"Neoliberalism" appears to have run out of options in Argentina, and that this kind of article could appear, in all apparent seriousness (from a 'chief global economist at Zurich Financial Services - perhaps one of the "controllers" of Argentina's banking system?), is a measure of their desperation in this case (as with Japan in a different context).
Some countries seemed destined to act as extreme, exceptional limiting cases. Argentina was the limiting case of US led "fordist" dependent development in the 1960s under the authoritarian Organia regime. It failed in the 'Cordobaza' (a famous uprising of workers of an entire municipality) and dissolved into the semirevolutionary chaos of the Peron camarilla in the early 1970's. It, together with its neighbor Chile, were therefore destined to be the harbinger of "neoliberalism", well before Thatcher and Reagan, under bloody military dictatorships who ruled with a viciousness of international notoriety. But, hey, someone had to play the "bolshevik" of the new international regime of capital.
So today Argentina appears again at the limit. This time, though, it is hard to see how military dictatorship would be an option for capital, in the absence of the very powerful and highly political mobilizations of the Argentine working class that characterized that period, which the dictatorship was designed to level in a process that took two decades: decapitation in the '70's, exhaustion in the '80's.
So, effective military annexation under the cover of "missile defense" may not be so farfetched after all.
-Brad Mayer