Crying With Argentina

Although images of the riots in Argentina have flickered across our television screens, hardly anyone in the U.S. cares. It's just another disaster in a small, faraway country of which we know nothing — a country as remote and unlikely to affect our lives as, say, Afghanistan.

I don't make that comparison lightly. Most people here may think that this is just another run-of-the-mill Latin American crisis — hey, those people have them all the time, don't they? — but in the eyes of much of the world, Argentina's economic policies had "made in Washington" stamped all over them. The catastrophic failure of those policies is first and foremost a disaster for Argentines, but it is also a disaster for U.S. foreign policy.
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thanks to Red Rock Eater Digest

Inequality -- and Uncle Sam -- at the Root of Argentinean Crisis

Secure in the belief that Argentina's economic collapse will not spill over to the rest of the hemisphere, the Bush administration has chosen to stand aside. That may be a fair assessment of the immediate economic risk to other countries. But there is a lot more to Argentina's free fall than economics.

Underlying the economic crisis is a social crisis that afflicts virtually all of Latin America. If not addressed soon, this crisis will undermine attempts to integrate the economies of the Americas, and become a serious drag on the U.S. economy.
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thanks to wood s lot

Argentina's Crisis, IMF's Fingerprints

As Argentina's government was resigning in the face of full-scale riots and protests from every sector of society, a BBC-TV reporter asked me whether this economic and political meltdown would change the way people viewed the International Monetary Fund. I wanted to say yes, but I had to tell him: "It really depends on how the media reports these events."

So far it looks as if the IMF is getting off easy, once again. The Fund and the World Bank -- the world's two most powerful financial institutions -- learned an important lesson from their brief spate of bad publicity during the Asian economic crisis a few years ago. They have become masters of the art of "spinning" the news.
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