ES EN
Menu Menú

Publications

Publicaciones

Search Publications

Buscar publicaciones

Filters Filtro de búsqueda

to a

clear selection Quitar los filtros

none

Article Artículo

Argentina

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Former Argentine Dictator Calls for Coup Against Cristina Kirchner’s Government

On Saturday March 16th, a weekly newspaper from Spain, Cambio16, published an interview with jailed former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. Videla is serving two life sentences, another 50-year sentence, and continues to stand trial, for crimes against humanity, kidnapping, torture, and the unlawful appropriation of babies (that were taken from female prisoners who gave birth in captivity before they were murdered). These were crimes that he and fellow junta leaders committed following the 1976 coup d’état that they directed and that was responsible for the kidnapping, torture and deaths of an estimated 30,000 Argentines. 

When his interviewer, Ricardo Angoso, whom Página/12 points out is a stated opponent of the Kirchner government and far-right journalist, asked him what he would say to his “comrades” also serving time in prison for similar convictions, he stated:

I want to remind each one of them, especially the younger ones, who today on average fall between the ages of 58-68, and are still physically capable of combat, that in the case that this unjust imprisonment and slandering of the republic’s basic values continues, you reserve the duty of arming yourselves again in defense of the republic’s basic institutions, which are today being trampled upon by the Kirchner regime, led by president Cristina and her henchmen.*

According to Página/12, Videla also accuses the current government of wanting to turn towards a “failed communism of the Cuban sort.” He then declares that “it will again be the security and armed forces who, along with the people –from which they [the security and armed forces] originate- will impede it”. 

CEPR and Sara Kozameh / March 19, 2013

Article Artículo

Is USAID Mainly Serving U.S. Interests?
An op-ed in Bloomberg Businessweek yesterday lays out the case for USAID reform, highlighting the case of contractors in Haiti (and citing this blog) as an example. The piece, by Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development, also examines the politi

CEPR / March 19, 2013

Article Artículo

David Brooks Tackles Progressive Caucus Budget: Remedial Logic to the Rescue

David Brooks has trouble with issues of logic and arithmetic as he frequently demonstrates in his column. His criticisms of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) budget suffer badly from this problem.

The piece begins by telling readers that the CPC has broken with past liberalism by seeing the government, rather than the private sector, as the engine of growth. His basis for this argument is that the CPC proposes a large program of public investment to restore the economy to full employment. Brooks distinguishes this spending from prior efforts at stimulus:

"liberals have always believed in Keynesian countercyclical deficit spending. But that was borrowing to brake against a downturn when certain conditions prevail: when the economy is shrinking; when debt levels are low; when there are plenty of shovel-ready projects waiting to be enacted; when there is a large and growing gap between the economy’s current output and what it is capable of producing.

"Today, House progressives are calling for a huge increase in government taxing and spending when none of those conditions apply. Today, progressives are calling on government to be the growth engine in all circumstances. In this phase of the recovery, just as the economy is finally beginning to take off..."

Let's see, Keynes advocated large amounts of spending when the debt to GDP ratio in the United Kingdom was well over 100 percent. (FWIW, our interest to GDP ratio is extraordinarily low.) He also advocated this spending when the economy was not shrinking, it was just stagnant or growing slowly at a time when there was mass unemployment and the economy was far below its potential. Maybe Brooks doesn't consider Keynes a Keynesian.

Dean Baker / March 19, 2013

Article Artículo

Robert Samuelson: "What Frustrates Constructive Debate is Muddled Pundit Opinion"

Okay, that's not exactly what Robert Samuelson said, but pretty close. He actually told readers:

"What frustrates constructive debate is muddled public opinion."

I just thought I would make a small change in the interest of accuracy.

Samuelson is very upset because almost no one, Democrat, Republican, or independent wants to go along with his crusade to cut Social Security and Medicare. He tells readers with disgust:

"In a Pew poll, 87 percent of respondents favored present or greater Social Security spending; only 10 percent backed cuts."

He then demands that President Obama rise to the occasion and insist that people accept lower benefits.

President Obama's time can probably be more productively spent teaching economics and arithmetic to people who write on budget issues in major news outlets. Most of the main assertions in Samuelson's piece are misleading or just flat out wrong.

First, the budget is only constrained at the moment by superstition. There is no obstacle to the government borrowing more money to meet needs and put people back to work. We are not spending more money because we have superstitious people with large amounts of power who are making claims about the dangers of deficits that they cannot support with evidence. Rather than lecturing seniors, who have a median income of $20,000, on the need for lower Social Security and Medicare benefits, Obama could try to confront the people spreading superstitions about deficits.

Samuelson's complaint about the size of spending on the elderly is also highly misleading. He complains:

"In fiscal 2012, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and civil service and military retirement cost $1.7 trillion, about half the budget."

Dean Baker / March 18, 2013

Article Artículo

Capitalism, Steven Pearlstein, and Morality

The Washington Post had a major column by Steve Pearlstein on the front page of its Outlook section headlined, "Is Capitalism Moral?" The piece notes the sharp upward redistribution of income over the last three decades and asks whether we should just being willing to accept market outcomes.

Of course this question is absurd on its face. The upward redistribution of the last three decades was the result of deliberate government policies designed to redistribute income upward; it was not the natural workings of the market.

For example, trade policy was quite explicitly intended to place segments of the U.S. workforce in direct competition with low paid workers in Mexico, China and other developing countries. The predicted and actual result of this policy has been to push down the wages the bottom 50-70 percent of the workforce to the benefit of those at the top.

This was hardly the free market. We could have adopted trade policies that were designed to put doctors, lawyers and other highly paid professionals in direct competition with their much lower paid counterparts in the developing world. If we had done this, doctors in the U.S. might be earning closer to $100,000 a year rather than the current average of more than $250,000 annually. This would transfer more than $100 billion annually to the rest of the country in the form of lower health care costs.

The government also strengthened and lengthened the periods of monopoly protection provided by both patents and copyrights. This has hugely increased the amount of rents being paid to high-end earners, the pharmaceutical industry and the entertainment industry at the expense of everyone else.

Dean Baker / March 17, 2013

Article Artículo

Argentina

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

British Analysts Side with Argentina on Falklands/Malvinas dispute, or … as a headline from the Onion might read, “Surprise! Occupiers of occupied land want to remain part of occupying state."
On Tuesday, the results of the British Referendum on the Falkland/Malvinas Islands came in. According to the BBC, out of the 1,517 votes cast in the referendum, representing 90 percent of eligible voters on the island, all but three of them voted for having the islands remain territory of the U.K. As the British government must have realized before holding the poll, this is not surprising. Despite the relative proximity of the islands to the Argentine mainland, their inhabitants of the island ha

CEPR and Sara Kozameh / March 15, 2013