[JohnRawls]

There is nothing wrong with appointing his sister. If she has qualities to occupy that position, then no problem.

According to libertarianism and classical liberalism, democracy is dangerous in some ways. It meay lead to erosion of civil liberties and free markets. The assumption revealed to be true when you look at today's US government and Western European governments. These countries less free today than 1920's.

Britain has become a libertarian country way before it became a democracy, for example.

Are you on drugs or something? How come appointing family members is not a sign of corruption? This is corruption 101 that you appoint cronies and family in to high government positions while giving them full access to de facto control private enterprises along with it.

[QatzelOk]

Doubtful.

The new government has already devalued Argentina's peso by more than 50%, and the economy minister, Luis Caputo, said that the central bank would target a monthly devaluation of 2%.

So a short-term 1920s "freedom!" meme, followed by decades of 1930s depression?

Imagine if people actually were allowed to understand history and anthropology.

[Tainari88]

It is a bad sign indeed. Not all right wing people are assholes though that is just your prejudice.

I respect Milei, he is announcing in his maiden speech that he intends to shock the economy and the poor are fucked. He is a man of his word. He said there is no money. We are fucked as a nation. They have to accept the adjustment of poverty and no services.

He is an asshole. Lol. Here he is:

Am I prejudiced against the Right? if the Right had functional policies for creating a working class in Latin America that could eat, sleep in a home, find jobs, educate their children heal their sick people, and have hope for a future? They would not leave their nations and risked death, risking deportation, and a lot of problems.

The Right does not care about poor people. The percentage of poor people in Latin America is ENORMOUS. So, if you do not give a shit about them? Be mature. They will get ANGRY. They will vote against the rich and the libertarians with shock doctrines and no policies for the poor.

That is not being prejudiced. It is being objective.

I said it before John Rawls, I do not care what bullshit a politician says they are for. They should not waste time on hating and expulsing the opposition to their politics. They should spend all their time IMPROVING the conditions and economy, social and cultural life of their nation. For everyone of the citizens they serve. I do not care about their labels. I see results or lack of results.

One also has to acknowledge what Imperialism means in the world and how evil it is. It is a very evil force. It uses the massive power of economic might, military might and social and geopolitical might to force their will on nations with less resources, less military and less access to economic options. They effectively become the old has been from the past monarchies that everyone agreed during the past 17th, 18th and 19th centuries that were obsolete and dysfunctional. Progress is really about getting masses of people educated, clothed, housed and medically cared for and infrastructure becoming well done and logical and supporting the ability of people to move around and to be able to work and live so that they can produce for the society and pay taxes and be productive.

The way it is set up for Latin America is not that. It fails. Neoliberalism was to eliminate government regulation from impeding private industry. What it has resulted is in the dictatorship of the corporations and of the oligarchic industries. And the erosion of protections for workers, unions and privacy rights, and basic needs being met. It has accelerated inequality. Inequality gini index means that corruption is going to be likely the outcome of wide gaps between rich and poor.

So it is a failed economic model.

Time to do a reboot. If we survive nuclear war and other factors.

[wat0n]

Why has emigration from Argentina greatly increased these last few years?

[Tainari88]

Why has emigration from Argentina greatly increased these last few years?

Inflation and having to pay the IMF interest payments. They could not stop the results of that reality. It is not some mystery. I already posted how the IMF neoliberal policies endorsed by them means the shock doctrine.

Milei is going for the shock doctrine. He even uses their language.

Here is what that neoliberal model is about.

The Austerity shit model only makes for more instability, and immigrants fleeing. The ones running the show are the US, the UK, Germany, wealthy nations. They of course want to make money off of their loans. If the nations can not pay back the loans with the required interest? They can take over ports, resources, and basically BUYOUT that nation. Without toppling the government and installing puppet regimes. It is the way of controlling nations without committing troops to occupy that place. It is really just creating the environments for war. Because if people cant feed their kids or educate their kids or have a bed to sleep in and a way of getting medicine and basics? They will be immigrating. The number one reason for immigration is economic. No doubt on that one.

It should lead to a mass exodus to Mexico from Argentina. And a mass exodus to the USA.

Unfortunately the USA immigration system is broken and unless you speak English well, have some STEM skills and so on and get a favorable VISA status to the USA it won't matter if you are from Argentina and need to make $40 bucks an hour for a middle class life. The immigration people in the USA need to give those jobs to US citizens first.

The reality is that four nations are the ones with the largest amount of new US citizen applications, and Argentina is not on the top four slots.

It is Mexico, China, India and Cuba. Those four. Argentina is not on that list mainly because of its distance from the USA and also because it does not have a long immigration chain there. The other nations do. Most new American citizens apply for for their family members. Next employees for certain industries.

About 9 million immigrants qualify for becoming US citizens each year. Only one million apply for that. Many just want to work in the USA and go back and forth to their native countries Wat0n. It is interesting to understand the motivations for immigrating.

The US has a long and expensive immigration process.

*********************************************************************

KEY FINDINGS FROM THIS REPORT INCLUDE:
The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated problems in the system and worsened already-worrisome national trends.
On March 18, 2020 — due to COVID-19 — USCIS stopped conducting in-person interviews and oath ceremonies for immigrants seeking to become naturalized citizens. These immigrants had already made it through most of the naturalization process after many months—sometimes years—of waiting when the naturalization process was halted. Nationwide, there were well over 100,000 naturalization applicants already stuck in limbo, with thousands more piling up by the month.

The volume of applications received each year does vary, but only slightly. However, ahead of elections, the number typically does increase more significantly. From July through September 2020, citizenship data shows that nearly 35% more people applied for U.S. citizenship than during the same period in advance of the 2016 election. Boundless estimates that nearly 300,000 would-be citizens should have been eligible to vote in the 2020 elections— including many Senate runoffs— but couldn’t due to the suspension of naturalization services.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic upended the immigration system, the demand for U.S. citizenship in recent years has remained higher than that in 2016–2017. But just as demand soars, so do the processing times, deepening the naturalization crisis around the country.

By the end of August 2022, the processing time for a citizenship application had surged to almost 18 months — more than double the processing time between 2012 and 2016. (Note that the processing time for a citizenship application is from receipt all the way until the final oath ceremony, not just the approval of the application.)

Average citizenship processing times
These processing times kept rising because the government could not keep pace with the volume of incoming applications, which only got worse as the COVID-19 pandemic led to reduced staff, hours, and capacity. After a 2-year spike in 2016–2017, the volume of citizenship applications fell slightly in 2018 and 2019, only to once again surge to historic levels from 2020 to present.

In 2022, almost 14% of all citizenship applications received resulted in a denial. This rate of denial was about the same a decade ago – 13% in 2009 – and fell briefly in the last few years, but following the pandemic, it rose sharply again. Becoming a U.S. citizen is much harder in some places than others.
Even before the delay from COVID-19, immigrants seeking naturalization faced an uneven, challenging landscape. USCIS field offices around the United States handle naturalization applications differently, with dramatically different processing times, most of which have increased over the last few years.

[wat0n]

@Tainari88 why did Argentina become indebted with the IMF in the first place and when did this cycle start?

[Tainari88]

@Tainari88 why did Argentina become indebted with the IMF in the first place and when did this cycle start?

I have an interpretation coming up in nine minutes. I got to wash clothes too.

Come on Wat0n you want me to do an entire course on Argentina for you? Lol.

You can read up on it and then do what I do...which is identify some really trustworthy scholarly reports of experts in a series of economic models and then look for information in both Spanish and English sources, from native Argentinian sources and US English speaking experts on South American national economies.

You then dig in to that information and do cut and past notes. And do an analysis of the reasons a policy is successful or fails.

It is just good journalism or investigation skills or research skills. I had a major in mass communications and journalism and was two courses from graduating in that major in my undergrad degree but I switched to Anthropology at the last minute. I had done a year in research on how to cope with statistics and do analysis for defective graphs, charts and research.

But anyone can do a good in depth dive into finding information Wat0n.

But, I got to go to work. My brain has to switch over to Spanish and English, and then again back again. Hee hee.

[wat0n]

Just FYI, Argentina first started its cycle of indebtedness with the IMF in 1958.

Was it due to neoliberalism?

[Tainari88]

:roll:

Just FYI, Argentina first started its cycle of indebtedness with the IMF in 1958.

Was it due to neoliberalism?

Milton Friedman wrote his neoliberal policies a few years before that date. He had meetings with the IMF about it. You did not know that?

Here is what you are missing to put it together wat0n:
What is neoliberalism Milton Friedman?
Milton Friedman, wrote in his early essay "Neo-liberalism and Its Prospects" that "Neo-liberalism would accept the nineteenth-century liberal emphasis on the fundamental importance of the individual, but it would substitute for thenineteenth-century goal of laissez-faire as a means to this end, the goal of the ...

[wat0n]

Milton Friedman didn't have much influence in the 1950s, he was as influential as other academics and not a well-known economist yet

[Tainari88]

@wat0n the gig got kicked back by one hour. Lol. Oh, uh, I got to go do some errands.

But mull over this you sin verguenza....

As an economic philosophy, neoliberalism emerged among European liberal scholars during the 1930s as they attempted to revive and renew central ideas from classical liberalism as they saw these ideas diminish in popularity, overtaken by a desire to control markets, following the Great Depression and manifested in policies designed with the intention to counter the volatility of free markets.[18] One impetus for the formulation of policies to mitigate capitalist free-market volatility was a desire to avoid repeating the economic failures of the early 1930s, failures sometimes attributed principally to the economic policy of classical liberalism. In policymaking, neoliberalism often refers to what was part of a paradigm shift that followed the perceived failure of the post-war consensus and neo-Keynesian economics to address the stagflation of the 1970s.[19][20] The collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War also made possible the triumph of neoliberalism in the United States and around the world.[21][22]

[wat0n]

@Tainari88 European neoliberalism is not what we know as "neoliberalism" today. It's more like what people label as "ordoliberalism".

[Tainari88]

Milton Friedman didn't have much influence in the 1950s, he was as influential as other academics and not a well-known economist yet

@Potemkin wrote about the beef industry dying out after WWII. Argentina was a world beef exporter and heavily relied on that as a cash flow. That contributed. Peron was a populist and someone who was not the best at economics.

But by far the biggest problem in Argentina was too much emphasis on a lack of diversifying the economy and again, what grows a nation is having a lot of investment in free public education, good health care, and affordability of housing and of investment that is stable.

Again, the bottom line has to do with being able to get results. Avoiding mass layoffs and unemployment, and a total lack of services or ability to be self sustaining.

It is a series of issues.

Economics is not something that should be shunted aside when planning governmental policies. But? If you have internal pressure and an Empire with banks controlled by them who run the entire world economy fighting hard your ability to set up functional systems? You have to be very shrewd, judicious and dedicated to get your programs to work.

You have to be highly organized, responsible and dedicated and have a very deep and good bench of people who are going to support you on your programs. If you fail at that? You will have an unsuccessful result. It won't matter if you are Right or Left.

It requires a lot of work. The Right's worst flaw is always going to be ignoring the needs of the many in the nation. You either deal with the big huge numbers that the working and lower middle classes and middle classes represent? Or you will be just another cog serving an elite and not having any real impact on stability in Latin America.

[wat0n]

@Potemkin wrote about the beef industry dying out after WWII. Argentina was a world beef exporter and heavily relied on that as a cash flow. That contributed. Peron was a populist and someone who was not the best at economics.

But by far the biggest problem in Argentina was too much emphasis on a lack of diversifying the economy and again, what grows a nation is having a lot of investment in free public education, good health care, and affordability of housing and of investment that is stable.

Again, the bottom line has to do with being able to get results. Avoiding mass layoffs and unemployment, and a total lack of services or ability to be self sustaining.

It is a series of issues.

Economics is not something that should be shunted aside when planning governmental policies. But? If you have internal pressure and an Empire with banks controlled by them who run the entire world economy fighting hard your ability to set up functional systems? You have to be very shrewd, judicious and dedicated to get your programs to work.

You have to be highly organized, responsible and dedicated and have a very deep and good bench of people who are going to support you on your programs. If you fail at that? You will have an unsuccessful result. It won't matter if you are Right or Left.

It requires a lot of work. The Right's worst flaw is always going to be ignoring the needs of the many in the nation. You either deal with the big huge numbers that the working and lower middle classes and middle classes represent? Or you will be just another cog serving an elite and not having any real impact on stability in Latin America.

The Left's worst flaw is in ignoring precisely the issues you mention, isn't it?

Even under a charitable reading of the behavior of leftist politicians as just naive yet well-meaning politicians, they have also failed to deliver on their results. The issue is deeper than just about ideology, it's hard for a country with a lot of national resources to diversify.

[Potemkin]

The issue is deeper than just about ideology, it's hard for a country with a lot of national resources to diversify.

Now this, I agree with. There has, historically, been a failure of both the left-wing and right-wing governments of Argentina to face economic reality and fix it. And fixing it means diversifying the economy, a necessarily painful and slow process. The glory days of the 1910s and 1920s were bound to end, since it was based on a fragile economic foundation - the export of beef to the nations of North America and Europe. A lot of African nations have the same problem, and are vulnerable to the whims of the international markets in tin, or copper, or coffee. This cannot end well for them, any more than it did for Argentina.

[wat0n]

Now this, I agree with. There has, historically, been a failure of both the left-wing and right-wing governments of Argentina to face economic reality and fix it. And fixing it means diversifying the economy, a necessarily painful and slow process. The glory days of the 1910s and 1920s were bound to end, since it was based on a fragile economic foundation - the export of beef to the nations of North America and Europe. A lot of African nations have the same problem, and are vulnerable to the whims of the international markets in tin, or copper, or coffee. This cannot end well for them, any more than it did for Argentina.

This is not an Argentinian thing, beating the Dutch disease is hard in general. In fact, if you accept this, you can actually make progress by at least diversifying among raw materials - so you don't concentrate exports on beef but diversify with beef, wine, soybeans, copper, lithium, etc. It's not a solution but ameliorates the issue somehow since the economy and particularly the public sector can adjust to a negative shock to only one commodity export (say, beef) by relying on the others for tax receipts.

[Tainari88]

Now this, I agree with. There has, historically, been a failure of both the left-wing and right-wing governments of Argentina to face economic reality and fix it. And fixing it means diversifying the economy, a necessarily painful and slow process. The glory days of the 1910s and 1920s were bound to end, since it was based on a fragile economic foundation - the export of beef to the nations of North America and Europe. A lot of African nations have the same problem, and are vulnerable to the whims of the international markets in tin, or copper, or coffee. This cannot end well for them, any more than it did for Argentina.

Potemkin, trying to create a space for democratizing labor in a world run by a very tight stranglehold of money by only one or two wealthy countries throwing their weight around does not work.

In the end cooperation and diversifying does require a lot of work.

Do you think Milei man is going to be the Savior of Argentina yes or no?

[Tainari88]

The Left's worst flaw is in ignoring precisely the issues you mention, isn't it?

Even under a charitable reading of the behavior of leftist politicians as just naive yet well-meaning politicians, they have also failed to deliver on their results. The issue is deeper than just about ideology, it's hard for a country with a lot of national resources to diversify.

No, the problem is the Right are a bunch of ruthless corrupt killers of the worst sort in my honest opinion. Who on top of being ruthless killers and corrupt snobs and elitist assholes with zero ability to solve the problems of huge swathes of poor and underclass Latin American people in their own nations, they pander to a bunch of powerful Yankees who use carrot and stick diplomacy and could not care less about the people who they should be serving the most. The most vulnerable and the most needing of stability.

They should be fucking ashamed of their lack of humanity and their class conscious BULLSHIT. But they are not.

As for the Leftists who do not do the hard work of creating functioning systems and talk a lot of cheap rhetoric? They are not my example of what can be accomplished. Unlike you I really do think principled people who serve the ones who need the most from a healthy economy only can come from a Leftist perspective.

Anyone who thinks class systems are forever and that being elitist is how you solve issues in democratic republics are dumb as fenceposts. That is my opinion.

[Potemkin]

Potemkin, trying to create a space for democratizing labor in a world run by a very tight stranglehold of money by only one or two wealthy countries throwing their weight around does not work.

In the end cooperation and diversifying does require a lot of work.

Do you think Milei man is going to be the Savior of Argentina yes or no?

Almost certainly not. Like Trump, he’s a false prophet, a fake messiah. Like Trump, he acts like a wild man, so people think he can shake things up and change things. But, just like Trump, he probably doesn’t want to do the unglamorous and thankless work required to actually make positive changes in Argentina’s economy and political culture. We’ll see though….

[wat0n]

No, the problem is the Right are a bunch of ruthless corrupt killers of the worst sort in my honest opinion. Who on top of being ruthless killers and corrupt snobs and elitist assholes with zero ability to solve the problems of huge swathes of poor and underclass Latin American people in their own nations, they pander to a bunch of powerful Yankees who use carrot and stick diplomacy and could not care less about the people who they should be serving the most. The most vulnerable and the most needing of stability.

They should be fucking ashamed of their lack of humanity and their class conscious BULLSHIT. But they are not.

As for the Leftists who do not do the hard work of creating functioning systems and talk a lot of cheap rhetoric? They are not my example of what can be accomplished. Unlike you I really do think principled people who serve the ones who need the most from a healthy economy only can come from a Leftist perspective.

Anyone who thinks class systems are forever and that being elitist is how you solve issues in democratic republics are dumb as fenceposts. That is my opinion.

Pretty much nobody does that hard work in Latin America, and even when it was seriously attempted it didn't end well. In practice, the protectionist policies necessary for what you're saying led to cronyism and corruption (one case being, yes, Argentina).

At best, you can find successful examples of what I mention here:

This is not an Argentinian thing, beating the Dutch disease is hard in general. In fact, if you accept this, you can actually make progress by at least diversifying among raw materials - so you don't concentrate exports on beef but diversify with beef, wine, soybeans, copper, lithium, etc. It's not a solution but ameliorates the issue somehow since the economy and particularly the public sector can adjust to a negative shock to only one commodity export (say, beef) by relying on the others for tax receipts.

I'm guessing @Potemkin may be able to explain why is this a realistic first step? I mean, you won't believe me anyway, will you?