Remora

Limited Inc wants to point you, this morning, to this article by Ken Silverstein in the American Prospect.The article is a variation on shooting ducks in a barrel -- Silverstein trolls the American press for its past coverage of various Latin American free marketeers, who have recently been coming to bad ends, along with their countries. The coverage, it turns out (to no one's surprise) was more starry eyed than accurate, reflecting the usual fantasies of the exploiter class. Oh, drat, there's that Marxist vocabulary again! What we meant to say is that it reflected the innovative but sometimes not quite realistic thinking of the entrepeneurial class. Is that better?

Here's a pin-em-to-the-wall graf:

"Among Latin America's "reform-minded leaders," according to a laudatory 1991 article in the Post, were Menem, Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela, Carlos Salinas in Mexico, Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru. A decade later, one of these five crusading reformers has been impeached, three live abroad in disgrace, and the other, Menem, is widely reviled and suspected of plundering Argentina's state treasury. Had the U.S. press not cavalierly dismissed the "short-term pain of millions," [a phrase used in another Post article] maybe none of this would have come as such a big surprise."

Silverstein flips through the careers of the big five highlighted by the Post. What do we find in the eight years since Latin America discovered the magic of the marketplace? Thuggery, bribetaking, bubble markets, devaluations, suitcase toting exile, police repression, and ineffectual bail-outs. Sound familiar? Sound like the seventies? Sound like the eighties? It should. The same situations get repeated over and over because there is no cool vision about just whose interest is being served in the formation of economic policy. Why, after all, should the US be considered a neutral party when it operates, and has always operated, in its self interest? I've just finished an interesting book about just this subject: Uncommon Grounds, the history of coffee and how it transformed our world, by Mark Pendergrast. Coffee once accounted for up to 40% of Brazil's GDP. It is still a major export. The US is the major consumer of the drink. And the history of the trade between the US and all the coffee producing countries of Central and South America is poisonous, a matter of stolen Indian land, oversupply, and continual pressure by the US to keep coffee prices as low as possible. I think we will have more to say about this book in a later post.

Here's another Silverstein graf. Venezuala is in the news today -- its current honcho, Chavez, apparently thinks Castro's polity is some kind of model to mimic. A back to the future kind of thing. A let's get retro kind of thing. Here's the background.

"Consider Venezuela. After Perez was elected in 1989, its economy was the first in Latin America to be deemed a miracle. The country's gross national product climbed sharply at the start of Perez's tenure, but simultaneous austerity policies caused the real value of salaries to fall by almost half. In 1989 the government decided to triple bus fares. Riots broke out, and the security forces summoned to quell them killed somewhere between 400 and several thousand people, mostly in the poor barrios. Perez's popularity plummeted. For some reason, this baffled The Miami Herald, which reported in 1992 that international economists were "puzzled by Venezuela's generalized malaise because this oil-rich country is the economic star of the Americas."

Implicated in a series of corruption scandals, Perez was forced to resign in 1993. He now resides in the Dominican Republic. Last December a Venezuelan judge announced that his court was considering bringing charges against the former president and that Perez would be placed under house arrest if he returns home."