Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Argentina bans buying dollars

Monica Showalter of Investor’s Business Daily has the story (emphasis added):
Argentina Dollar Ban A Sign Of Failed Socialist Policies

Socialism: In the latest chapter of Argentina’s war on economic reality, President Cristina Fernandez has banned the buying of dollars in a bid to halt capital flight. It’s a market verdict on her policies, and it won’t stop dollarization.

Putting dollar-sniffing dogs on outbound ferries from Buenos Aires to Uruguay apparently didn’t halt Argentinians’ desire to get their money out of the country. After losing a billion dollars a month to capital flight by small investors in 2011’s fourth quarter, Argentina continues to lose about half that amount as citizens send assets out of the country.

And why shouldn’t they? In the last three years, Argentina’s government has seized private pensions to pay for pork barrel social programs, raising government spending to 38% of GDP.

It has been caught lying about its inflation statistics (officially around 30%), a sign it’s now printing money. It has started paying down its foreign debt with its central bank reserves — some $4 billion out of its $46 billion kitty. It has also just told banks they’ll have to lend $3 billion to politically favored businesses in an Obama-style effort to pick and choose winners and losers.

Once again, Argentina’s damaging, once-a-decade cycle of devaluations and defaults is kicking in.

This matters because so much of what Argentina’s leaders are doing is being justified with the sickly-sweet logic of the left. In reality, it’s about force.

Go read the whole thing.

And, on the topic of the flight of capital, former Clinton fundraiser Denise Rich Dumps Citizenship to Save on Taxes

I didn’t know she spoke Austrian.

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Capitalist press, and Holder’s justice

Two must-reads for a Saturday afternoon:

As South American media faces a huge challenge over freedom of expression, Austin Bay explores Will the Next Press Be Capitalist?

China is spending $7.5 billion to turn its three main (government-owned) media giants, CCTV, Xinhua and the People’s Daily, into major international news outlets. There will be more English language print and broadcast news, as well as more uncensored news. Thus the recent censoring of the new American president’s inauguration speech (to delete critical comments about communism and countries that jail critics of the government) inside China, would not occur in overseas broadcasts, in order to give the impression that China does not censor domestic content. The expanded foreign news operation would employ more foreign correspondents, providing the intelligence services with operatives in more (more than a hundred) countries. The expanded news effort would make it easier for China to counter negative news stories about the Chinese government.

Do we invoke American exceptionalism and say “It can’t happen here?”

The answer to this question will most likely depend on the fate of what Bay refers to as a “micro-empire”:

Reliable delivery matters, but in the digital world points of sale proliferate. Running a microempire requires establishing new mutual support arrangements. The smart “micro-empire” will link with the best broadband service (converge with the infrastructure) and in ideal situations provide the “most local” user interface with the broadband service. This creates opportunities for delivering entertainment content and a news service that is elaborative while leveraging “social network” community input and feedback capability. Readers with picture- and video-capable cell phones are text, video, and audio resources. As gadfly bloggers, they are investigators. Read-view-listen provides multiple ways to advertise as well as deliver content. Mobile phones and PDAs are vehicles for delivering content. Shoot the paper horse, but maintaining a paper pony offers a bridge to digital devices. A weekly broadsheet headline summary of online stories inserted in the grocery store’s freebie ad supplement (available at the store or sent by snail mail) does more than pick up a niche market of shoppers. Put text or video download information by the headline so the shoppers—if they choose to do so—can retrieve the entire story on their phones or PDAs. That would carry a small download fee to non-subscribers, billed through the mobile phone company. An audio summary could play via the phone or PDA through a listener’s car speakers as he drives home from the store.

The “micro-empire” may also feed hourly updates to local radio and local TV—at least until the micro-empire becomes local television.

A convergence micro-empire:

This convergence micro-empire is a lean, fast, agile, risk-taking outfit. Convergence has very positive organizational effects, akin to what McLuhan meant by a “new” medium having unobserved effects (“changing the ground,” as he put it). Convergence shrinks the bureaucracy. Convergence doesn’t have time to wait for committees to reach a consensus. Editors and journalists must make decisions—but thanks to the technology, updates and corrections are easy.

The underlying issues on any of these are credibility and integrity. Go read the entire article for his answer to “Will the Next Press Be Capitalist?”

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Speaking of integrity,
Roger Kimball takes a look at Eric Holder, he who was behind the Marc Rich pardon. I actually remember the day I read the news on the pardon, since The Husband – who almost never laughs about news – thought I had come up with a really good joke when I read him the news article.

Roger starts his article, Eric Holder Does Justice, with

Hilarious statement of the week:

“I will work to restore the credibility of a department badly shaken by allegations of improper political interference. Law enforcement decisions and personnel actions must be untainted by partisanship.”

Holder is now working to transform the Department of Justice from the rule of law into the pursuit of “social justice,” which means no justice at all: Nominees for the tax division with no experience at all in the field, prosecutors with no prosecutorial background, and on and on.

We have seen what deleterious effects the “social justice” agendas have had in Latin America. Now we’re about to experience it here.

Let’s hope the bloggers and journalists Austin Bay refers to are up to the task of reporting about it.

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Holder: the wrong man for the job

I remember years ago when I read about Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, how I was reading the newspaper and The Husband walked into the room and I said, “Clinton pardon Marc Rich,” to which The Husband laughed, thinking it was a joke.

It wasn’t.

Even worse was Clinton’s pardon of the FALN terrorists (Gateway Pundit links to this list of list of FALN attacks), who had not requested clemency in the first place:

The prisoners were convicted on a variety of charges that included conspiracy, sedition, violation of the Hobbes Act (extortion by force, violence or fear), armed robbery and illegal possession of weapons and explosives — including large quantities of C-4 plastic explosive, dynamite and huge caches of ammunition. Mr. Clinton’s action was opposed by the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. attorney offices that prosecuted the cases and the victims whose lives had been shattered. In contravention of standard procedures, none of these agencies, victims or families of victims were consulted or notified prior to the president’s announcement.

The Clinton administration did not contact the victims’ families. Let that sink in for a moment.

Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder had to testify at the Senate Judiciary Committee on the pardons:

Now Obama has named Eric Holder his Attorney General.

Wall Street Journal editorial:
Eric Holder’s Politics
His years at Clinton Justice don’t inspire confidence.

In 1999, President Clinton offered clemency to 16 Puerto Rican members of the terrorist FALN, despite a previous warning from Attorney General Janet Reno that the group posed an “ongoing threat” to U.S. security. Here again, Mr. Holder’s role seems to have been larger than he has let on. A 1999 New York Times report notes that Mr. Holder and Justice Department pardon attorney Roger Adams met in November 1997 with Democratic House Members to discuss the Puerto Rican case.

“According to Mr. Adams’s notes,” reported the Times, “Mr. Holder told the members of Congress that because the prisoners had not applied themselves for clemency this could be taken that they were not repentant, and he suggested that a statement expressing some remorse might help.” Ultimately, the prisoners were freed having never offered a statement of remorse. The pardon was widely seen as an attempt to curry favor with Puerto Rican voters ahead of Mrs. Clinton’s 2000 Senate bid.

The WSJ also talks about the Marc Rich pardon, and also about Ira Magaziner’s misleading statements, and concludes,

For a politicized Justice Department, none can compare to the Clinton Administration’s, and the role that Mr. Holder played in it deserves the fullest airing before he is given the opportunity to return.

Hope, change, and back to the future abuse of executive power.

UDPATE
John Fund has more on Marc Rich’s Man at Justice.

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