EUROPE DOESN'T GET IT: "THE DEAD CAN'T PAY THEIR DEBTS," ARGENTINE PRESIDENT WARNS

Speaking Aug. 2 at the Buenos Aires Board of
Trade, celebrating the 158th anniversary of its founding,
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez once more slammed European
governments for killing their citizens through brutal austerity,
recalling her late husband Nestor Kirchner’s 2003 warning to the
UN General Assembly that “the dead can’t pay their debts.” He
explained there why the imposition of austerity would never bring
about a recovery in devastated Argentina, and stated he wouldn’t
place bankers’ interests before those of his own citizens.
“I have the feeling that Europe doesn’t understand this,”
Fernandez said. Look at Spain. “How can you have growth if people
lose their jobs, their wages are cut, their houses are or
auctioned off, and their benefits are taken away?” She reported
she’d read that 10% of Spain’s public sector jobs were being cut
along with 50,000 public hospital beds. {“You can’t sustain an
economy or a society under these conditions,”} she warned.
In Europe today, “what you have is an incredible speculative
crisis… something we know very well.” Argentina was “strangled”
by foreign debt, she said, debunking the idea that there has been
an “excessive amount of public spending” in Europe. What there
has been, she said, is a bailout of the banks, such as Spain’s
Bankia run by former IMF director Rodrigo Rato, “who used to
lecture us” on economic policy, yet his bank had to be bailed out
to the tune of 230 bn. euros. “There has been an incredible
bailout of the banks, so they can pull out of their difficult
positions” in the Southern European nations, yet these “are the
same banks that lent” to those countries!
This, she said, is exactly “like Argentina in 2001″ when
foreign financial predators imposed “mega-swaps” and bailouts
with usurious conditions, and promised this would protect the
country with protective “armor” against crisis. Right up to the
moment the nation imploded, financiers proclaimed that the
economy was really “solid.” It was a fraud, Cristina said, and
Argentines were the victims.
The President spoke one day before her government paid $2.3
bn. to holders of the Boden-2012 bonds, for funds frozen in the
“corralito” (little corral) imposed in 2001 by lunatic finance
Minister Domingo Cavallo. She used the occasion to document how
foreign debt, beginning with the infamous Baring Brothers’ loan
of 1811, was used to loot the country, providing details on the
“bankers’ arithmetic” by which Argentina kept paying and paying,
but always owed more, while the bankers’ made a killing.