You know it is drivel when even this anti-globalist want to puke:
Whenever another country slides into the troughs of socioeconomic collapse the establishment media feature stories such as this. Decent people, university education, reduced to being starving scavengers. No context. No explanation of how this happened. The hand of Satan did it. The establishment. The Washington Consensus. A neat mixture of sob sister, Methodist old-line gospel compassion for the poor and Marxist class analysis. Bullshit.
Argentina was at the very bottom of the First World before WW1. It was the nation of the future. Millions of Europeans moved there to seek their fortunes. Argentine playboys were stock figures on society pages in major capitals and in popular fiction. So what went wrong?
1. Argentina’s prosperity was built on agricultural exports. Agriculture was been a wasting asset since WW1. Farm prices surged during the two world wars but crash as a whole in the past century.
2. The oversized capital was the main vote center but produced nothing the world wanted. So whenever Argentina has had democracy, it has expropriated the farm income to provide social benefits for city dwellers. This works for a few years. Then there is nothing more to steal. That is a hard message in a democracy. There is always a party that claims they can expropriate the foreigners and rich. If the party comes to its senses a new party forms with the old message. As long as the rich are merely squeezed hard instead of liquidated Leninist style [which Argentina like most of Latin America never did] there are always rich to point to.
3. The periods of dictatorship lead to a magic thinking mistake. Restore democracy and the mistakes of the lost years go away. Dictatorship often works in Latin America. Chile could never have modernized without the Junta. Brazil could never have modernized as much as they did. The Argentine generals were still statist populists. They just distributed the boodle a bit differently. So each bout of dictatorship just lets new fools tell people that as soon as democracy comes back they can vote themselves European standards of living instead of just European civic and human rights. In fact there is no way to make up the lost years. Generations will have to work hard while being poorer than their grandfathers to restore Argentina. That is a hard sell in terms of both human nature and democratic politics. Try to tell Argentines that Chile had a good junta, Brazil a fairly good one and they had stupid generals and a stupid dictator in Peron. LOL. It is true but LOL.
4. A closed economy can work, up to a point. However can and does are two different things. A closed Argentina has a big enough internal market to get back to 1950-70 GDP / capita while using what exports it has to buy things that have to be imported. However that means no Euro or Japanese luxury goods in the stores. That means no new toys for the military. That means accepting that you were rich and are now poor. LOL.
5. Beyond democracy Argentina’s main mistake was trying to tell three competing discourses. First was the economic alliance with Brazil. They would get a continental size market for Argentine exports by selling goods that weren’t good enough for the world market in Brazil and the other neighbors. Second, they were going to eliminate the rampant inflation that has plagued Argentina’s spendthrift governments by dollarization. Third they would do the first two things to make many people better off without making anyone or any region in Argentina worse off. Now in fact dollarization did end the inflation. However the Brazilian deal doesn’t work if you dollarize. Brazil regularly lets its currency depreciate. So you can have a dollar equivalent currency and be priced out of the neighboring markets or you can cut the link to the dollar. Argentina papered over for years. Every major business publication in and out of the country knew it. However you don’t tell the voters the truth. There is always another election. Another party congress. As for the losers, you paper over with local governments printing fake money that they call bonds, IOU’s, whatever and paying people with them. Like counterfeit money, in small quantities no one is hurt. Over time the quantities grow. Over time other people don’t want to hold the toilet paper. So they convert to dollars. Some are fools and believe that the government will never touch internal dollar accounts. Some are smarter or older and get the money out of the country. So the government borrows. It tries to put some controls in. There is no easy way out. The debt gets bigger and bigger. The capital flight gets worse and worse. The political backlash against anyone who will tell the people that their choices are what type of pain to take gets worse and worse. Anyone can read the stats. By the end Buenos Aires has a higher dollar cost of doing business or going on holiday than Paris. In the aggregate anyone can understand that this cannot last. But who gets reduced from a professor to a beggar? Who loses her life savings? Who loses their house and gets to sleep under a bridge? No one volunteers.
6. So the inevitable happens. The private lenders pull the plug. The international lenders keep Argentina afloat but demand reforms that no politician can deliver – stop issuing the local IOU’s, fire people, cut expenditures – basically inflict pain on a massive and escalating scale. A junta could do this. Note: could not would. A democracy? LOL. Yet the same people who ask for the austerity insist on human rights to keep ‘their’ First World voters and media happy. Crisis. Default. Implosion. Massive infliction of pain but now you can blame the foreigners – the IMF, the US, the Washington Consensus, the foreign investors, the foreign owned banks, the black helicopters, the ASB’s.
7. These are the sad truths. Worldwide exaggerated expectations of how democracy and economic growth can work in 3rd world countries. Worldwide overcapacity in every industry driving down prices and wages. A vast debt overhang that probably won’t be paid but that certainly doesn’t prompt lenders to send more. A wired globe where everyone with a TV dish can see First World prosperity first hand. Basic human nature – you want the gain without the pain and will vote for those who tell you that you can have it. Add in many 3rd world countries a sense of entitlement based on past sufferings, silly national discourses about what the world owes them, envy, greed, spite – all the usual human emotions. I would love a First World media that explained what opening China has done for the world economy. I would love a First World media that built statues to Pinochet, Chaing the Younger and Deng for creating economies out of which human liberties might grow in later generations. I would first believe in ASB’s.
Scott
BUENOS AIRES -- The ghost train arrives at dusk.
Hauling rucksacks, pushing grocery carts and makeshift dollies, the people known as cartoneros tumble to the platform in clots, then scatter through this twilit neighborhood of leviathan high-rises and marbled condominiums to sift though the evening's garbage for soda bottles, cardboard, newspapers: whatever the recyclers will take off their hands.
Miguel Machado is among the first to exit. He is 46, square-jawed, Rock Hudson-handsome and in a hurry. Picking through other people's trash is the family business and the Machados are short-handed tonight. His wife is home with the babies, both of them sick, leaving Miguel with the couple's five oldest children. With the recycling fetching only pennies per pound, every hand counts.
"Mario, come on," he says to his lanky 16-year-old son, who is pulling the hood of his sweatshirt over his head to fend off the brittle cold of autumn.
Miguel quickens his step, lowers his head, leans into his dolly.
"It's time to go to work."
When night falls, an occupying army of mostly cashiered factory workers rides the trains into the city from its rust-belt perimeter. On any given night, government officials estimate, there are as many as 40,000 garbage-pickers, or cartoneros -- cardboard men -- roaming Buenos Aires. That number has increased more than tenfold since Argentina's economic collapse. Now, there is not enough trash to go around. Miguel likes to arrive early and stake out his turf.
"People will fight you over the garbage," Miguel says.
He is standing under a streetlight with his children, poised and waiting for the night's rubbish to be hauled out.
"We are living like animals now," he says.
Scrap by scrap, the Machados grind out a few dollars a day from their neighbors' grime and refuse. Their improvisational effort is a template for millions of workers in the developing world who are part of a growing labor force that is off the books and on the margins.
Work is not what it used to be. Shrinking economies are squeezing the life from the full-time, 9-to-5 jobs with benefits and security that have historically been the bricks and mortar of modern industrial states. An amorphous informal sector accounts for nearly half of all jobs in the developing world, according to a 2001 study commissioned by the World Bank, and is growing larger still.
Here in Buenos Aires, that means a nightly scramble for trash. The doormen have their favorites and will often separate the good stuff and set it aside for families like the Machados, good people who don't just rifle through the trash bags and leave a big mess for the doormen to clean up. But you have to be quick or they'll leave it for someone else.
"The doorman has something for you," Miguel says to his son Lucas, 9, round-faced and chatty, and in the midst of putting his brother Jonathan, 11, in a headlock.
Miguel points to a figure standing in the shadows 30 yards away. "Go get it. Run. I think he has newspapers."
Miguel once worked the sugar cane fields up north, but moved 15 years ago to the city, where he got a job at a flour mill and made some good money. "I've never been afraid of work," he says. "Whatever you got, I'll do it. Just give me a chance."
The mill shut down two years ago. A lot of places here shut down. Miguel started plucking through garbage. On a good night, the family can salvage $10, maybe $12 worth of recyclable goods. Four hundred pounds' worth. Better than nothing, but barely.
"This is not the life I wanted," he says.
His goals are simple: to buy a house, take his children to see the ocean, buy them decent clothes. "This is the best I can do for now," he says.
The Informal Sector
About 83 percent of the jobs created in Latin America are in the informal sector, according to the World Bank study. Developing countries have not generated salaried, industrial jobs in the numbers produced by the United States and Western Europe. While advocates of global markets say jobs should be created by opening business and investment to greater competition, some studies on the effects of globalization in the Third World show that jobs and per capita income have declined in recent years.
In Latin America, per capita income increased by 75 percent between 1960 and 1980, but only 7 percent between 1980 and 2000, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. Since 2001, income per person has declined.
Argentina enjoyed periods of soaring growth in the early 1990s, only to end the decade in depression followed by financial collapse. Since then unemployment rates have soared. An economy that only 25 years ago employed nearly three-quarters of its urban workers in the formal public and private sectors has is producing garbage-pickers, street peddlers and shoeshine men.
"The promise the West and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund always made to these poor countries is, 'Do what we say and you will be rich like us,' " said Richard Freeman, a professor of labor economics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, referring to the catalogue of free-trade and monetary reforms made by countries such as Argentina during the 1990s. "The tragedy is that a lot of them have done just that and they're actually worse off than they were before. It's a crisis of deindustrialization."
A decade of free-market reforms in Argentina ate away at domestic industries unable to compete with an influx of foreign goods. When the government devalued the peso in January 2002, a painful recession was transformed into the worst financial crisis in the country's history. The economy contracted by 16 percent in 2002, according to the International Monetary Fund. The jobless rate surged to an unprecedented 22 percent, and with it, the number of cartoneros. According to government statistics, there were only about 3,000 cartoneros working in Buenos Aires four years ago.
Argentines jokingly refer to the evening swarm of trash-pickers as the night shift. They are the most painful and visible symbol of the disintegration of a country that, compared with its South American neighbors, once had relatively few people living in poverty.
"I cannot walk down a street in Argentina today without having to avoid someone -- a man, a woman or a whole family -- searching through a mountain of garbage," said Juan Conzi, 63, a retired metalworker. "And it breaks my heart every single time."
So many cartoneros converge on Buenos Aires each night that provincial transportation officials this year removed the seats from a fleet of trains and designated them solely for their use. It was dubbed the ghost train, Miguel says, because it is as if the cartoneros "don't exist in this world."
Lessons of Broken Glass
"Jose!" Lucas calls to the doorman, Jose Ojeda, who has just handed him a garbage bag. Lucas is staring intently at the bag as if it's a meteor that fell to Earth.
"Is there glass in here?"
"No, I don't think so," Jose answers, standing in the dim foyer light with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jean jacket.
Lucas taps the bag with his foot.
He does it again and again until he is no longer inspecting for glass but dancing a sort of triumphant samba with a trash bag.
The first thing you learn as a cartonero is that there is sometimes broken glass in garbage bags. The second thing you learn is that you don't want anything to do with the broken glass that is sometimes inside garbage bags. The third thing you learn is the sound of broken glass when you pat, shake or kick the garbage bag before opening it.
"I've cut my hand twice," Lucas says. He is a fireplug of a kid, with long, black hair that constantly gets in his eyes and shoes with holes so big that you can see his toes. He knows all the doormen by name, and argues with them about soccer.
He doesn't really mind the work, he says. He likes being outside, likes being with his brothers and his father, likes the banter with the doormen. Sometimes the waiters at nearby restaurants hand him a plate of pasta or bread while he works.
Since his father lost his job two years ago, things have changed for Lucas.
He used to eat yogurt and cereal for breakfast every morning. Now, if he's lucky, he may have cereal, and often dry at that. No milk.
For dinner, when things are really tight, his parents have only mate -- traditional Argentine herb tea -- sipping it slowly while the children finish what's left of the food.
His parents argue more now, he says.
'If We Do It, We Eat'
The Machados work six nights a week, five hours each night, rain or shine. They divide 20 buildings among them. Miguel takes eight, the biggest and most affluent ones that produce the most volume. Nothing stirs so much joy in him as when he stumbles on a stack of newspapers, which sell for the equivalent of nearly 8 cents per pound, or maybe an old lamp that he can sell to a second-hand dealer for 75 cents.
"Their garbage," he says. "Our blessing."
The children -- Lucas, Jonathan, Mario, Romina and Maria -- split the 12 other buildings.
"The kids," says Miguel, bending over a bag filled with nothing more than grimy Styrofoam, "they want to play. I know this is not a good time to be a child. But they don't always understand that this is my job. This is our job. If we do it, we eat. Nothing more, but we eat. They don't always understand that."
Except Romina. She is 15, lithe as a ballerina but strong as a bull and bossy when need be.
"She's like our mother," says Jonathan.
"I put a lot of trust in her," Miguel says. "She's more responsible than the others."
"They are lazy," Romina says of her brothers and her sister, who is 12, as she uses all her weight to push the nose of the dolly down so that it is resting solely on its wheels.
She says she can handle a dolly with as much as 400 pounds by herself. The trick, she says, is balance and alignment. Always keep the wheels straight in front of you; otherwise, she says, "it will attack you."
When she first started working on the streets, she woke up sore for a week. "But the body gets used to it," she says. Once, a passing car nicked the dolly as she was pushing it. Just about broke her arm in two, she says.
"You have to really watch the cars," she says.
She has a boyfriend. He is 17 and a cartonero as well, working with his father in a neighborhood not far from here. She met him at her 15th birthday party.
She wishes they had more time together.
She wants to be a doctor. It's hard to find time to study. She hates to get her hair dirty.
But it's not so bad, she says. Half the children in her class at school are cartoneros, she says, so she's not embarrassed by it. She meets people on the streets. She finds herself easily bored when she's home.
This, she says, is not hard. She pauses a moment and the words spill from her mouth like rain.
"Let me tell you what's hard. What's hard is waking up in the morning, fixing my father's mate and doing all the stuff that needs to be done around the house, going to school, coming home to study, then coming out here to work, getting home at midnight, then waking up six hours later and doing the same thing over again."
She inhales. "Sometimes I do miss my old life where I could just stay home and study."
At the factory, Miguel's take-home pay was $600 per month, he says.
"Is this a job?" he says as he ties Coke bottles together with string. "No, this is a necessity. This is survival. This is so I don't have to steal to feed my family. This is only one step from that.
"I hate this. Everyone who does this hates it."
It is 10 p.m. and the streets are cluttered with cartoneros pushing their loaded dollies, beginning to head for the train or the recycling plants to sell what they've collected. Miguel and Romina push their load slowly, robotically, while the others prance off in the moonlit distance.
"We're done," Miguel says as he makes his way toward the train station with garbage piled nearly six feet high for the 30-minute ride home.
"We'll be back tomorrow."
Special correspondent Brian Byrnes contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
posted by scott 7:07 PM