WAGGING THE DOG

 There’s an old adage that says that a dog is smarter than its tail, because if the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog. From that maxim comes the expression “to wag the dog”, which means to create a diversion from some action or event you want to hide by drawing as much attention as possible to something of entirely secondary importance. Illustrative of this type of ruse was a 1997 black comedy called, precisely, Wag the Dog, in which Roberto De Niro plays a top Washington spin-doctor who contracts a Hollywood film producer (Dustin Hoffman) to help him fabricate a fake war in Albania as a means of covering up a White House sex scandal in which the president is caught making illicit advances to an underage “Firefly Girl” (a fictional Girl Scout type organization).

The film created quite a stir upon its release because the real-life dog-wagging that had been taking place in the US capital at the time had managed to span two presidencies and rendered the movie prescient. Although in the original novel by Larry Beinhart the plot obviously had to do with cover-ups in the government of George H.W. Bush and the country’s precipitous entry into its first war in Iraq (Desert Storm), the motion picture’s debut coincided with the emergence of a sex scandal involving Bush’s successor, President Bill Clinton, having to do with his Oval Office liaisons with a 22-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. More chilling still was the coincidence between the movie’s plot and Clinton’s orders to the military to bomb suspected terrorist strongholds in Africa, just when the scandal was breaking. Although Wag  hasn’t been a very popular movie since then, it got great reviews and Oscar nominations at the time, and—probably thanks to how uncannily on the nose it had been—managed to take in an estimated US$50 million over its US$15 million budget at the box office, despite a relatively short run.

Dogo argentino (Photo by Christian

Pinatel via Creative Commons 3.0)

Wagging the Dogo. Here in Argentina, the administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is no stranger to wagging the dog—or dogo, as it were. This said, however, the president’s smoke-and-mirrors crew can hardly be accused of being original. Since long before Cristina came to office, husband Néstor had already started wagging one big dog in the Argentine public’s face: namely, his former bosom buddy turned archenemy Héctor Magnetto, CEO of the Clarín Group media empire. Reported to have said that he had to “put Magnetto in jail before he puts me in jail,” Kirchner made discrediting Clarín and building public enmity for its media his number one priority and his widow has carried on that tradition following her husband’s untimely death.

But the government’s attacks on Clarín and its heavy-handed attempts to manipulate the law and justice as a means of stripping Magnetto and his media of some of their admittedly awesome power—a portion of which was gained back when the Kirchners and the media mogul were still on friendly terms—has, to an exasperating degree for the president and her crew, backfired, by generating support for the media group from the ever-increasing segment of the population that opposes the Kirchner government and that perceives the anti-Clarín campaign as a blatant attempt to muzzle the press. This attitude has been reflected too in such major exponents of free expression as, among others, the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), which has issued public opinions criticizing the government for undermining the principle of free expression in Argentina. And it has emerged as well in national justice where, when pushed to “obey orders” from the president, jurists pushed back and reaffirmed their independence as one of the three separate branches of government.

Other times, when the Kirchners and Magnetto were still on

speaking terms.

So it is that long-time independent observers of the local media like myself  have looked on with a mix of astonishment, amusement and horror as Clarín—whose apparent editorial policy has long been “the art” of innocuously filling in the holes around the advertising and whose flagship paper, in terms of any genuine coverage of an ineludible reality that it provided, might as well have been absent from Argentina during the entire dictatorship that bathed the country in blood from the mid-seventies to early-eighties—has suddenly been launched to the position of avant gard transgressor and principal opponent to the Kirchner autocracy, and to that of paladin of the free press as well. For anyone who has ever risked anything to ensure that the truth was told to the public in Argentina, the situation can’t help but seem ludicrous, especially when the government’s attacks have extended by association to Clarín’s paper-manufacturing partner, La Nación, which has also garnered a fresh image as a major defender of truth and justice among the anti-Kirchner opposition. This, from a paper, whose publishers, in the past, were, at the very least, the useful idiots of the former military regime and, along with Clarín, mass-circulation suppressors and confounders of truth or any sort of objective reporting about fundamental principles that really mattered. In this process, Kirchner strategists have probably done Clarín’s readers, viewers and listeners in particular a great service, since the group has gone outside of its own rarefied environment to contract some outstanding political commentary talent to help it make its case against the administration: independent journalists with their own bones to pick that just happen to coincide with Magnetto’s desire to chop the floor out from under Cristina, certainly not the least of whom has been brilliant veteran newsman Jorge Lanata.

Canus Malvinus. Wagging those particular dogs, then, has chalked up a score of Dogos One − Cristina nada, and has probably only added impetus to the plummeting popularity the president has been experiencing in recent months. You would think that supposedly savvy politicians would be quicker to learn from their own erroneous new tricks than old dogs are, but no...The more the anti-Clarín campaign has gone south, the more Cristina Kirchner has been beating her Malvinas Islands drum—another issue so utterly lacking in originality or possibilities for any sort of success as to make you wonder what Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman could possibly be thinking, considering that this particular tail has had its proverbial dog wagged off.

It’s not as if the foreign minister were a party yes-man picked to fill his post because of favors owed or services rendered in local politics. Timerman—whose newsman father the former military regime sought to silence but instead turned him into an international celebrity by kidnapping and torturing him as well as confiscating his newspaper before forcing him into exile—had achieved a certain international standing of his own before signing on with the Kirchners. He holds a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia University and has, over the years, been a frequent columnist in such major US publications as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and The Nation. He was also an active member of the Fund for Free Expression, a London-based free-press advocacy group. So with a foreign minister of his international experience, how can the president be so ill-advised as to be clinging for dear-life to an issue that, handled as she is handling it, could only further undermine Argentina’s relations with the major world powers and stir up the reheated enmity of the very people with whom the government should be apologetically and humbly seeking to forge the most cordial of relations if it ever hopes to peacefully resolve the Malvinas/Falklands dispute once and for all? The only answer possible is that this is a domestic rather than foreign policy and that its purpose is merely to override negative local headlines by, again, wagging the (Malvinas) dog, convinced, as the president seems to be, that the negative reactions her clumsy overtures are bound to bring abroad will be positively newsworthy for local readership.

But at what cost?  There is good reason to believe that, once upon a time, before the 1982 war precipitated by the Argentine military government’s decision to take the islands by storm—in yet another act of unmitigated dog-wagging—Britain might well have been willing to eventually discuss the possibility of some sort of joint stewardship of the Malvinas/Falklands. With patience, according to an article at the time by savvy Canadian-born author, journalist and international affairs expert Gwynne Dyer, the then-twelve hundred islanders would eventually have been told that they could remain there under the conditions agreed to in an Anglo-Argentine pact, or they could exercise their right to self-determination elsewhere in the Commonwealth, because, logistically, the archipelago was simply too far away and too expensive for London to continue to fund and administrate alone.  At the time, however, the islanders had overseas-territory citizenship status, which meant that they were British subjects, but for the purposes of actually going to live in the British Isles, they were basically “tourists”, who needed to go through a particular immigration process if they wanted to take up residence in the UK proper. While twelve hundred Falklanders could easily have been absorbed by Britain, they had the same passport status as millions of Hong Kong Chinese, and if London were to set the precedent of full citizenship status for the South Atlantic islanders, how could the government avoid giving the same option to the millions from Hong Kong who might want to emigrate to England when that former British colony was returned to mainland China’s jurisdiction in an Anglo-Chinese accord slated for execution in 1999? So when the Argentine Armed Forces government’s Foreign Minister Nicanor Costa Méndez approached his contacts in London about the possibility of opening immediate talks about the future of the islands, he was told that any change in the status of the Falklands was very low on the British priorities list. And so it was that the Argentine dictatorship, which was desperately seeking a cause around which to re-rally support, as its popularity and backing plummeted, decided to raise that priority to number one overnight.

The tragic 1982 war in the islands between Argentina and Britain set back any bi-national rapprochement on the subject of Argentina’s claim by decades. And the billions of dollars that Britain has had to spend on its “Fortress Falklands” policy since then has rendered relative any resource exploitation the UK has been able to achieve there or any that it might have planned for the immediate future. Meanwhile, the war completely undermined any previous bargaining power Argentina might have had with the islanders resulting from the Falklands then having basically been administrated by a British trading company and having had to count on vital mainland Argentine services, such as regular local flights to and from the islands and complex urgent medical treatment.

Despite the horror and sadness that the islanders suffered during the war, since then, they have gained enormously. Since that tragic time 30 years ago, their population has doubled, they have been fully recognized as British citizens, they have their own governing council, they have ample military and economic protection and promotion from London, their infrastructure has been vastly improved,  and most important of all, they have gained top diplomatic priority: The British government has repeatedly and unequivocally stated since the war that no decision about the future of the islands can be taken without the prior approval of their inhabitants.

Regarding Argentina, meanwhile, a recent statement on Twitter by the local Falklands government reads: “Argentina say their claim to our home is a global issue, yet the one people they won’t talk to are the Falkland Islanders. Hypocrisy?”

Try as Kirchner surrogates might to convince the public that the president’s Malvinas crusade is an altruistic campaign to return the islands to their rightful Argentine owners, considering this administration’s continuous dog-wagging strategies—from its anti-Clarín campaign to its juggling of the books at the National Statistics and Census Bureau and to its use of the Tax Board as a political tool with which to pressure its opponents and publicly discredit them—this seems less than credible. It appears far more likely that the Malvinas have been rolled out of storage and dusted off once more as the perennial “anti-colonial” warhorse around which Argentines will always rally, and, in the process, rally around whomever is willing to, once again, keep on beating that basically dead horse on a nationalist soapbox.  Or will they?

The tack the Kirchner government is taking on this issue is defiant, arrogant, disrespectful and ill-advised. While it might appeal to the most blindly nationalistic sectors of the population, the tactic of publishing open letters to Prime Minister David Cameron in London newspapers or of railing against British colonialism in the UN, while ignoring the very existence of the Falkland Islanders, as the president has done, seems almost infantile as well as inflammatory. If it “plays” at all, it does so to the chorus, and fails entirely to take into account that Argentine public opinion of today is not the same as it was in 1982. War taught the majority of Argentines some lessons about rash nationalist extremism, about the realities of war beyond incendiary speeches and false glory, about carnage, loss, defeat and humiliation. Those kinds of recollections are what prompted local protesters, following the Ghana government’s seizure of the Argentine naval training Frigate Libertad—in a dispute over a government bond default—to hold up signs chiding the president for talking about taking back the islands when she wasn’t even capable of bringing home a frigate.

The Frigate Libertad

But Cristina Kirchner seems to have an innate problem understanding the application of “register” to her rhetoric and once an international legal decision forced Ghana to give the ship up, she climbed aboard with a band of followers she took with her for the occasion and harangued the officers and crew with a battlefield-like address in which, of all the level-headed quotes by founding patriot General José de San Martín that she could have picked, she chose the one about fighting until there was nothing left to fight with and then, loosely translated, “fighting bare-assed like our brothers, the Indians.” Fighting what? Fighting whom? Evidently anybody and everybody who isn’t a loyal member of the Kirchner band.

"We'll fight bare-assed like our Indian brothers."

Anyway, this sort of silly grandstanding on the part of the president has done little more than consolidate the resolve of Britain and the Falklanders not to give an inch of ground and has served only for London to decide to bolster its garrison on the islands by 150 additional troops and to call a referendum for March 10-11 of this year in which the islanders will be asked to answer a single, simple question: “Do you—yes or no—wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?”

It’s not hard to figure out what their answer will be.

One of Bariloche's St. Bernards with City Hall in the background...

Another case of wagging the dog?

Wagging Patagonia Style. Meanwhile, the Andean ski resort of Bariloche remained at the top of Argentine national news schedules this past week as Mayor Omar Goye resisted the Kirchner government’s attempts to lay all blame on him for the pre-Christmas supermarket riots (previously reported on here), which began in that municipal jurisdiction and spread to towns and cities in ten other provinces. Try as they might, the president’s emissaries, Río Negro Governor Alberto Weretilneck and national Senator for Río Negro Miguel Pichetto couldn’t convince Goye to make the grand gesture the national administration was asking of him and step down, after it came to light in the press that his questionable practices were the probable cause that sparked the rioting.

Suspended Bariloche

Mayor Omar Goye

The job of forcibly removing Goye, then, fell to the local City Council, which, obviously under instructions from the Kirchner administration via Weretilneck, sifted through the city charter until they found grounds for suspension of the mayor from his duties. These included his loss of backing from the national and provincial governments, his questionable payment of AR$190,000 to a “social cooperative” that was among the chief organizers of the riots, his frequent absences from the city (the most telling one being on the day of the riots) and his general ineptitude. Goye was suspended for sixty days and given ten days to present his defense. After the 60–day period the municipal government is ostensibly bound to call a popular referendum to decide whether the mayor’s removal will be definitive or not, but the national government is obviously holding out hope that Goye can be convinced to quit on his own before then. In the meantime, he has been replaced by City Council Chairperson María Eugenia “Maru” Martini as the interim head of the municipal government. Martini immediately called on the Goye cabinet to present their resignations. She also reported to the press that she had been receiving telephone threats and other intimidatory pressures from the Goye camp. The disgraced mayor himself indulged in a bit of the fiery hyperbole the Kirchnerists are known for, telling supporters and detractors alike that this was “a war that’s only just beginning.” He also countered his suspension by calling for that of seven city council members on the same grounds leveled against him, since, he reasoned, if they had supported his policies, they were as guilty as he was. While this didn’t speak very highly of his government’s platform, it did indeed seem to make a point about shared blame.

In the end, the mayor’s disgrace and ouster would also appear to be a bit of dog-wagging. He has hinted repeatedly that if anyone other than the rioters were to blame for what happened, accountability stretched far beyond him and his immediate collaborators. He has tangentially sought to implicate the national government in the political and material support his administration has lent to social pressure groups like the ones involved in the riots and looting.  And, clearly, the wildfire spread of the disturbances from his jurisdiction to others more than a thousand miles away (including major cities like Rosario and Buenos Aires) makes it hard to see Goye as anything but the tip of the iceberg. The risk of trying to harness an unruly mob for political ends is, of course, that of losing control over the mob’s leaders, which begs the question of whether what started in Bariloche and went national isn’t, perhaps, a case of formerly loyal political “shock forces” going rogue to prove a point and to extort more power from their handlers.

 

 

PERONISM: THE ENEMY WITHIN...ALWAYS

Embattled Bariloche Mayor Omar Goye

Late this week, Argentina’s embattled Bariloche Municipal Mayor Omar Goye was still insisting he wasn’t going to resign. Nobody was really asking him anymore, in the aftermath of the December 21 riots and lootings that I reported on here last month, but he continued to state it anyway—and to just about anybody who would listen. Most local, provincial and national observers probably realized that his saying this was a sort of affirmation of faith, rather like whistling in the dark to belie his worst fears, because the question most people were asking was when rather than if he would quit, since he has done something that is hard to recover from in the Kirchner Era: ticked off the Queen Bee (or K) herself. And it’s a less forgivable sin still, because he’s not just another party dissident that President Cristina Kirchner is forced to cope with, work around or kick out of the way, but a player within Kirchnerism’s own internal party line, the FPV (Frente Para la Victoria).

Verticality. Peronism was conceived as a vertical organization. If today it often looks like a monster with multiple talking heads (each of which thinks it’s right), that concept still holds at the most basic of levels. And even if, as a party, Peronist Justicialism appears to be an illustration of the old adage about how if you put 50 Argentines in a room together you’ll get 50 different points of view, as a movement, Peronism is all about the tail always following the head. At the top of the Peronist heap, it would appear that Goye is seen as having cut a path of his own, and on top of that, defied a virtual order from the President for him to tender his resignation.

Rampart in the Civic Center

Yesterday, in the historical Civic Center, Bariloche’s main square, surrounded by the city’s traditional stone and cypress wood public buildings—designed by famed Argentine architect Alejandro Bustillo (1889-1982)—the mood was still so dense that you could cut it with a machete after the pre-Christmas riots that rocked the Andean resort and later spread to ten other provinces. The plaza had been shut off to vehicular traffic with caution tape barriers manned by traffic police and instead of being peopled by the usual throngs of blissful tourists who go there to have their pictures taken by photographers accompanied by Saint Bernard dogs that join travelers in the photo portraits, or with local artisans who deftly man chainsaws to carve statues from six-foot-tall sections of tree trunk, the entire center of the square was dominated by a monstrously large wooden structure not unlike the sentry’s walk from the rampart of a frontier fort. With ladders up both sides, and a catwalk perhaps 25 feet long and tall enough that it cleared the much-abused, graffiti-covered equestrian statue of General Julio Argentino Roca and, in the process, confined the nineteenth-century politician and military hero (depending on who’s telling the story) and his mount to a kind of stall beneath it. On this rampart, under it and all around it, were rotating shifts of protesters and their attendant general litter of tents, survival utensils, jugs, bags and banners.

Roca and his mount placed in a kind of stall.

On the sidewalks and street and under the arcades surrounding the square were perhaps a score or more of cops. Although some of them were wearing their flak jackets, their demeanor was less than threatening. They were clearly there as a symbolic presence of authority—so symbolic, in fact, that, if you looked closely, you could see that the holsters on their right hips were hanging empty, their regulation 9mm pistols having been left behind in the police station at the end of the block, nor were they carrying truncheons with which to defend themselves. If anything happened, it was only their bodies, their uniforms and their badges standing between the protesters and whatever random objective they might choose.

A House Divided. At first glance the scene looked as if it might be, like so many others before it, an installed protest against municipal authorities, but if you read the signs, you began to ask yourself if these were not groups led by the same “punteros políticos” (heads of local pressure groups from the poorest neighborhoods) with whom the mayor has so often been alleged to be conniving, since their messages were clearly directed at the provincial government—which, at this point in time, is unequivocally distancing itself from Goye and his administration.

One sign read: “We ask for work and you send us repression.” Another said, “Governor, you call us scabs, but we’re workers.” A large banner in the middle read: “May Day Cooperative: Union and Liberty, Work and Social Justice.” There was also a cryptic reference to the looting’s having been directed against “multinationals”. But go tell that to all of the mom and pop operations that were also victimized by the well-organized hoards that descended on the city last December 21. Try as these dubious activists might to make their “cause” sound noble, those incidents were a case of political chicanery at the service of mass vandalism and larceny, with no saving grace to justify them.

While such events may tend to confuse and confound those who are not privy to the inner workings of the country’s political underworld, the truth eventually percolates to the surface as the political players scurry helter skelter following revolts of this sort, seeking to shed responsibility and lay blame elsewhere while keeping their own political assets intact. As usual—over the course of the last 70 years of Peronist history in this country—what masquerades as “social upheaval for the cause of social justice” is actually the result of infighting at the core of Peronism itself, or “organized chaos” staged by one Peronist faction or another against whoever happens to be in power at any given time. Cristina Kirchner appeared to suggest this herself this past week when she referred to the December 21 riots as being “a shabby version” (versión desmejorada) of the organized mass looting and protests staged against the administrations of former opposition Radical Party (UCR) Presidents Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989) and Fernando De la Rúa (1999-2001), which ended both of their presidencies ahead of schedule. To her mind, there appears to be a single person accountable for the mess: Omar Goye.

Río Negro Governor Alberto Weretilneck

Early on after these latest riots, Río Negro Province Governor Alberto Weretilneck sought—perhaps thinking he might kill two birds with one stone—to blame elements in the UCR for the violence. But the Radical Party’s response was swift in coming and utterly clear-cut: Bautista Mendioroz, a leading UCR politician in the province, termed the governor’s accusation “an infamous calumny” and challenged Weretilneck to put up or shut up. If the governor had proof of what he was stating, said Mendioroz, then he should press charges and name names, and if he was proven right, the UCR would take its own actions to expel the perpetrators and bring them to justice. Nothing more of this sort was heard from the provincial capital and by this week, Weretilneck and Goye were swapping accusations of their own, making it fairly clear that the Bariloche riots were very probably the result of a feud between Peronists in power in both the municipality and the provincial governorship.

All About Money. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the bad blood between the governor and the mayor is, apparently, all about money. Weretilneck assumed the governorship a year ago, when his predecessor, Carlos Soria, who won office with the backing of Cristina Kirchner, was shot to death by his own wife on New Year’s Day, 2012, just 21 days after being sworn in. During a later tour of the province, Weretilneck publicly announced in Bariloche that the province would be allocating 500 million pesos to the city to provide, among other things, for its ambitious social programs. Goye later discovered that no such allocation was earmarked in the provincial budget, and has since accused the governor of making facile announcements for political gain and then welching on his promises. In the days leading up to the organized looting in Bariloche, which spread like a contagion to the rest of the country, Goye and his surrogates are reported to have repeatedly warned the governor that by not coming up with the funds promised he was risking a social explosion in one of Argentina’s premier tourist destinations.

The impression left by this is that in what started as a bid by the mayor to pressure the governor into putting his money where his mouth was, he may well have unleashed something he couldn’t control (especially since he was conveniently out of town during the riots), and something that grew a lot bigger than anybody would ever have expected.

Whatever the case might be, the person on which the turn of events reflected worst wasn’t the provincial governor, but the country’s president and her government, since the riots and looting spread to ten of the country’s 23 provinces and the chaos triggered in Bariloche fostered the impression of a country out of control, underscoring the growing perception that Cristina Kirchner has lost the majority support that swept her into a second term in office and that if she doesn’t start paying attention to the demands of a no longer silent civil opposition, she might well expect to end up like De la Rúa, whose ouster amounted to a civilian coup.

Sole Accountability. It would seem logical, then, that she might like to see Mayor Goye’s head on a platter, and that was precisely what she was calling for at the end of this week. She reportedly passed this “desire” on to Weretilneck and to powerful Río Negro Senator Miguel Pichetto, who immediately called on Goye to cross the province to the capital city of Viedma for a powwow. Already guessing what the meeting was going to be about (his resignation), Goye flatly refused, saying he was busy, and adding—rather cynically, considering the circumstances—that he “didn’t want to leave the city on its own,” because “you can see what happens when I’m absent for just 24 hours.” Undeterred, however, the governor and senator flew to Bariloche, where they held a meeting yesterday in the airport with Mayor Goye and strongly suggested he hand in his resignation. It was pretty clear that the two provincial authorities purposely made no secret of the meeting because news of it spread like wildfire throughout the national media. The situation was clear: the highest of national and provincial Peronist officials considered the mayor a loose cannon and were dumping him overboard before he could cause any more damage. If he defied them, he would do so in total isolation, which would make his viability as mayor untenable. This is particularly true since the justification that the authorities cited for giving the mayor his walking papers was the barely veiled extortion he allegedly perpetrated by hitting local businesses up for “Christmas gifts” for the poorer sectors of the population if they wanted to avoid retaliation.  

In point of fact, to what extent the national and provincial government were distancing themselves from Goye was clear immediately after the riots, when the governor showed up and outshined the mayor, virtually shoving him into the background and taking over. In a country where such crimes have often gone unpunished, Weretilneck praised the bravery of police in standing up to the rioters and revealed that the provincial special forces had been kept busy at the local jail where a prisoner revolt appears to also have been part of the planned disturbances. Ill-equipped regular police were forced, then, to cope with the early part of the riots and a score of them ended up getting injured. As a result, the governor said he would be making sure that police received a stock of riot gear usually only issued to the special corps. He also ordered 30 police raids, 23 of which turned up stolen merchandise. Another one brought the discovery of a crop of cannabis plants and residents there were placed at the disposal of a Federal judge. Police also confiscated over a score of vehicles identified in news pictures and security tapes as having taken part in the looting.

Clearly, investigators knew just where to go: neighborhoods known as 34 Hectáreas, Frutillar and Km 20 (Don Bosco), where punteros, who rather grandly refer to themselves as “luchadores sociales” (social fighters)—some of whom have been widely alleged to have loyalties to Goye—complained of police harassment.

In the end, Goye’s fate would appear clear. It seems the only question is whether he decides to make it easy or hard on himself and his city.

THE DECEMBER 21 SYNDROME, ARGENTINE STYLE




The good news is that the world, as you might have noticed, didn’t end yesterday. So maybe the Mayans just grew bored with making calendars and decided to get into a new racket. 

The Mayan Calendar ended yesterday...we didn't.

I have a friend who’s an optimist (now and then you run into one and I keep him close—like you might, say, an African wild ass, Asiatic cheetah or other endangered species—just because he’s so delightfully rare), and he's



The African wild ass, like

optimists, an endangered

species.

(Photo päts CC BY 2.0)

a student of ancient cultures to boot. He chided people all through the past year for repeating that thing about the Mayans saying the world was going to end (yesterday, as it turns out), telling them that the emergence of that idea was based on the ignorant theory of the Apocalypse. According to his studies, what’s going to take place—is, in fact, taking place, as we speak—has to do with the other root meaning of apocalypse: namely, a revelation. According to him, December 21 marked the start of a new, enlightened era in the evolution of Man. As of yesterday, the secrets and meaning of life will start to become clear to us all. Man will become more compassionate, more visionary, more in harmony with the world and his fellow human beings. The world, in short, since yesterday, will start living an aggiornamento that will, precisely, pull us back from the brink of self- and mutual destruction and lead us toward a state of grace in which everyone will work together for the common good. He further subscribes to a theory upheld by a number of obscure if clearly erudite anthropological researchers who, casting aside the findings of Richard Leakey and other noted scientists, claim that the origin and development of Man was just opposite to conventional belief. Man, these scholars say, didn’t first appear on the plains of Africa and then (for some inexplicable reason) make his way to the frigid north, only to then cross the Bering Strait and head back south, creating and leaving behind a string of Native American cultures in his wake. Instead, they say, Man originated in South America (Argentina, they believe), the precursor of the Inca, the Maya and the Aztec, and spread his culture northward, also becoming a great navigator and crossing vast oceans to sow the seeds of the civilizations that were to emerge in Minoan Crete, Phoenicia, Egypt and the Indus Valley.So, anyway, according to that theory, the Mayan Calendar is all about revelation, not destruction, and, if it is to be believed, Argentina might very well be the center of world culture and, thus, the very nucleus of the revelation that we should all be starting to experience as of yesterday at about twenty-four hundred hours, hora argentina.

I would really like to believe that theory. Really! Because, that would mean that I was living in the very epicenter of a marvelous new world of love, harmony and mutual respect and that I had something more edifying to look forward to in my old age than a plummeting decent into the inferno of human apocalypse in which all bets are off and we are back to a scenario of stick-wielding, rock-throwing survival of the fittest.

Unfortunately, the scene that Argentina woke up to on the morning of Friday, December 21, 2012, did little to support either of those theories and certainly did much to create a climate of apocalyptic chaos and anything but harmony. And the molten core from which that sensation emanated was right here, in the Andean mountain resort town of San Carlos de Bariloche, just 12 miles from where I live hidden away in the forest.  

I use the term “sensation” advisedly here, since this is the same word employed on numerous occasions by Argentina’s (in)Security Minister Nilda Garré to try and ward off criticism leveled at her as a result of ever more frequent and violent crime around the country. According to the minister, the insecurity nightmare that residents of Argentina’s cities and towns alike are experiencing is simply the sensation of unbridled criminal activity and juvenile delinquency (a feeling she blames, of course, on the anti-government media that, according to her, have blown the situation—or illusion of same—out of all proportion) not any real increase in crime. (Tell that to the daily victims and their loved ones, Nilda).

Looters turn Christmas into trick or treat by stocking up on stolen

pricey electronics.

Added to this sensation, we now have the December 21 Syndrome, which manifests itself as organized looting, but which has some much larger purpose behind it.

The detonator was located, as I say, here in Bariloche. First thing in the morning of an unseasonably cold, wet business day (December 21 is also the summer solstice in South America, but it was only a few degrees above freezing out), well organized looters marched mob-style out of their nearby neighborhoods on the rough Patagonian highlands surrounding the city and made their first incursion into the parking lot of the Changomás (Walmart) supermarket, which quickly became a sorry symbol and victim of this recurrent brand of terrorism. This was ironic, since before the arrival of Walmart, many of the working class and poor people who live in that windblown area far above the touristy Andean city whose downtown image graces postcards, posters and calendars, had to take a bus  down to town to do their shopping. Local supermarket chains had long ignored that area because they saw it as a market with too low a level of purchasing power to bother with. But they raised the roof when they heard Walmart had plans to come into town and set up out there, and tried to foster a municipal ban to keep the international chain out. A referendum was finally held and the City Fathers lost, as lower-class segments of the population (who far outnumber the well-to-do) overwhelmingly supported having a major store in their neighborhood. The compromise was Changomás (different name, different colors, reduced stock of merchandise: no Superstore for Bariloche). But then, as I say, the Friday attack wasn’t about social unrest. It was all about political skullduggery.

Looting...Patagonian style. 

Though driven back by vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped police (who used the store’s fire hoses, hockey sticks from its sports department and wooden curtain rods from the dry goods section to repel the attacking hoards), the rioters simply regrouped and returned, stronger than before, eventually overpowering all resistance, destroying the shopping center’s entrance, showering defenders with a hail of stones and other projectiles, flipping over cars in the parking lot or demolishing them where they stood, and even using one as a battering ram to knock out the store’s front doors. Once inside, although some did help themselves to food items, the real objects of their affection turned out to be clothing, electrical appliances and electronics (especially plasma TVs that went like proverbial hotcakes). So much for the argument about “the desperate hungry people” who had requested “Christmas food baskets”(see below).   

From there, the vandals moved on to other major supermarkets and a meat packing company, advancing like army ants, wrecking everything in their path and drawing ever closer to the city’s downtown tourist area. An unrelated incident added an even greater quota of confusion since, all morning downtown, local residents and visitors alike had been treated to the deafening petards, thumping drums and rasping chants of electrical workers protesting in front of the local light and power cooperative. But as word spread of the advancing looters in the hills above the mountain town, business people began circling their wagons. Residents scratched their heads as some businesses started surreptitiously locking up for their noon break an hour early. And baffled foreign tourists sat sipping their cocoa, munching pastry and worriedly asking each other what was going on as the town’s renowned chocolaterías started quickly rolling down their metal shop curtains over the display windows or covering the windowpanes with plywood, as if in preparation for a hurricane. By the afternoon, Bariloche gave the impression of being a ghost town, as it awaited the arrival of a detachment of Border Guards to reinforce beleaguered police units.

They demolished cars in the parking lot and used one as a battering ram to

take out the front doors of the store.  

Two years ago Bariloche was also the scene of rioting, which ended up with police shooting dead three of the violent demonstrators. Subsequent action taken against the police for being too quick on the trigger has brought ever more strict controls to bear on officers, which would tend to explain why in yesterday’s incidents cops were seen defending themselves by merely hurling back the same rocks that rioters threw at them. Some policemen were even seen using slingshots to return fire on looters who were armed with similar archaic weaponry.  

The flimsy excuse for the attacks was that the “social sector” had called on the city’s government to convince supermarket owners to donate “gift packages” of food (in the holiday spirit, you understand) to the poorest segments of the population so that they might have a merry Christmas, and that no answer to this “request” had materialized. So Christmas quickly became a sort of terrorist-style trick or treat. But it quickly also became clear that the attempted extortion and its aftermath were neither random nor isolated. Before people in Bariloche had a chance to even ask themselves if the problem was simply homegrown and the result of rich and poor living in such close proximity, the same scenes of violence, vandalism and larceny were being replicated in ten other provinces around the country and in suburbs of Buenos Aires, where looters attacked not only major supermarkets but also service stations and other stores. Scores of police and civilians have been hurt in the riots and two men died in the city of Rosario (one of a gunshot wound, the other after being knifed).

The question most people are asking themselves is, if these actions are politically organized—and they clearly are—whom could they possibly benefit?

Could it be the dissident trade unions that once again held a protest this past week and demanded that the government of President Cristina Kirchner stop overtaxing workers’ pay and start doing something about the rampant inflation that is making it harder and harder for laborers to cover their basic needs?  If it were, it would surely provide President Kirchner with a clear message about what a mess the unions could swiftly turn the country into if the government were to continue to ignore its demands for higher pay, decent retirement benefits and other worker entitlements.

Could it be the far left, which, having thrown in its lot with the dissident Peronist unions still has been unable to convince the middle class opposition to join forces with it? The middle class that mustered a million well-behaved and respectful protesters of its own last November isn’t ceding control of its own destiny to either the government or the dissident left and is standing its ground alone in the middle. Certainly this kind of lightning mass terrorism might be seen as a possible way of scaring both the government and the middle class into resigned acquiescence.

Could it be dissident Peronist politicians and strategists? There are clearly segments within the ever eclectic, cloak-and-dagger Peronist movement that feel the Kirchners have not only let them down but have also betrayed their interests. No one has been more relegated by the Kirchners than former president and powerful Peronist kingpin Eduardo Duhalde, who plucked the late President Néstor Kirchner from the obscurity of a southern Patagonian governorship to launch him overnight into the presidency following a major political crisis that rocked the country’s institutions, only to be paid back with ingratitude and disdain by both Kirchner and his widow, the current president.

Or could it be the Kirchner government itself? Its popularity has plummeted in recent months. The highly successful middle-class 8N demonstrations and successive open protests by Peronist labor unions and leftist workers movements have constituted the proverbial writing on the wall in this regard. Nor has the government been able to make good on its raison d’être: the destruction of the Clarín media group.  In the meantime, it has embarked on such obviously inflammatory moves as its plan to take over the traditional Palermo Fairgrounds in Buenos Aires from its clear-cut political rival, the Sociedad Rural Argentina, which groups the most powerful and conservative ranchers and landholders in this agriculturally rich nation. Drawing battle lines between the country’s poor and its well-to-do would be the worst possible thing that could happen to Argentina, but this government has never shown any sense of moderation and less still any spirit of cooperation and social harmony. It is a government that fosters head-on conflict constantly and which is adept in the use of lies and subterfuge for short-term political gain. If it thought that plunging the country into chaos might cover up a multitude of sins, while providing it with an excuse to invest itself with special powers, who—based on its performance up to now—could doubt that it might well do so?

In his highly controversial 1985 novel entitled El día que mataron a Alfonsín, Argentine author Dalmiro Saenz (in collaboration with Sergio Joselovsky) crafts a meticulous (and terrifying) blueprint of how mob violence is used in Argentina to hold democracy prisoner and bring about change by other means for the benefit of political power groups. What he describes is the kind of “social terrorism” witnessed in similar mass looting and rioting organized against the extraordinarily democratic government of Raúl Alfonsín in 1989, prompting the president to resign his post several months before the end of his six year term. And this was also the same sort of organized violence that cut short the elected government of President Fernando De la Rúa in 2001 and cast the country into institutional chaos for two years thereafter, until the democratic election of Néstor Kirchner in 2003. Saenz and Joselovsky make it clear in their book that in organizing such movements, the whole idea is to create suspicion and confusion by destroying every landmark with which a society can orient itself. And therefore, nothing is as it seems and anything is possible.

 Of that novel attorney Alberto Lampugnani, in his opinion “as an Argentine, as a democrat and as a jurist,” was quoted as saying that it was a story that “never should have been written,” adding that it was “sheer madness” and “with a pornographic ingredient.” In his complaint against the writers, he indicated that the book was a manual on “how to act as a mob and (provides) guidelines on how to lead one.” The lawyer went on to say that the book “teaches how important the element of surprise is in attacks on people and institutions, and it teaches that the people attacked remain paralyzed through fear and cowardice.”

I think it’s safe to say that Dalmiro Saenz would probably agree with the last part of that assessment. Perhaps he would even applaud it, since the whole idea of the book was to create a veritable X-ray of the inner workings of a “popular” coup and of who might benefit from it.

And just who might benefit is a question that depends entirely on the current situation and on who decides to use the method first, since a segment of the population long accustomed to receiving free handouts in exchange for fleeting loyalty is predisposed muscle just waiting for something to do, and if a few expensive items that can be fenced later for cash is part of the loot, all the better. But the main idea is to create a state in which the rules no longer apply, so as to be able to install new ones that benefit whatever power is behind the ploy. One of the nefarious characters in Saenz/Joselovsky’s story explains it best:  “Our intention is to carry out a power project…The motive and goal is to strip everything of solemnity, to disparage and undermine every social institution: family, society, churches, marriage, armed forces, justice, religion, honors, dignity, public offices, traditions, patriotic sentiment, the concept of shame and decency, [to render] innocence, holiness and heroism, etc., a joke.”

 

CRISTINA’S 9D ROCK BASH

Yes, my birthday is indeed on December 9, but no, I swear I had nothing to do with the extravaganza that Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner and Company staged at the Pink House in Buenos Aires last weekend. Though billed as ‘Democracy Day’, it more resembled a rock concert, and as if to ensure that everyone knew precisely whose party it was, La Cris—still not abandoning her mourning black, but wearing a shimmering body-clinging merry widow gown that managed to belie any hint of sorrow—decided to do her impression of Tina Turner’s ‘hip grandma’ twist-and-shout dance steps (a spectacle that would have been embarrassingly hard enough to watch,  even if she hadn’t been the nation’s current leader).    
Personal criticism aside, however, I hardly doubt the president would have ruled out standing on her head while smoking a cigarette held between the first two toes of her left foot if she’d thought it would better create the illusion of a relaxed, spontaneous outpouring of uncontrollable popular sentiment in favor of her administration, after the party she had planned for two days earlier fizzled, when Justice ruled she wasn’t allowed to dismantle the Clarín multimedia group just quite yet.

Oh, and she was so counting on it!  

For weeks, she and her surrogates had been gloating over the promulgation of the new Media Law that, among other things, would swoop down on December 7 and chop Clarín off at the knees. The pro-K camp was waiting with bated breath for that glorious 7D victory to rub it in the faces of the million-strong anti-K protesters who had their own night in the limelight on November 8.  

In fact, slaying the Clarín dragon has practically become the leitmotif of the president’s entire adminstration. In the cartoon world where Cristina Kirchner lives, inflation doesn’t exist (her pugnacious Domestic Trade Secretary Guillermo Moreno has long since helped foster that illusion—delusion?—by having his henchmen muscle the national statistics bureau staff into only saying inflation is what he tells them it is), social security pensioners are “vultures” who bellyache despite living in the lap of luxury (with, on average, about USD 384 a month—that is, unless you believe the official dollar rate, another mirror trick that makes 384 look like 512, as long as you don’t actually try to buy that many dollars with the pesos they give you), the country is self-sufficient in petroleum (which is why Argentina spends millions daily to import crude from Cristina’s mentor, Hugo Chávez), there’s plenty of electricity to go around (Clarín just pulls the plug now and then to scare everybody and make the government look bad), the national railroads aren’t in crisis (the disaster in which a commuter train plowed into the Once Station in Buenos Aires was just a quirk of fate), people aren’t starving to death in Chaco and Formosa even if it looks that way (the pro-Clarín  media mafia is probably importing those horrid pictures of emaciated people from elsewhere with the aim of fostering the idea that the Kirchner ‘progressive’ model isn’t working), the Central Bank has plenty of reserves (as long as nobody tries to buy more than twenty-five bucks to go on vacation to Disneyland), and the moon is made of green cheese. The only imperfect thing in this perfect cartoon world, then, is the Clarín Group, which used to be a friend, and was okay then, but which is now an enemy and must be destroyed at all costs.  

And then, in a cruel anti-climax to such a build-up, the Kirchner clan’s 7D didn’t happen. But Cristina wasn’t about to go without her party, so 9D was born. And Cristina got her big-gun rocker friends, Fito Paes and Charly García, to help her celebrate, so as to draw a crowd. But wait! What were they going to celebrate? Clarín, if only for the moment, had won—at least the round if not the match.

Why, they’d celebrate democracy, of course!

Telling signs of how the government’s supporters feel about such democratic institutions as freedom of expression and division of the three powers of government came earlier in the week, right after the court decision was handed down, when clearly organized rioters smashed windows and hurled red paint at the offices of Clarín Group holdings. And it seemed a bit ironic too, in the midst of all the reveling, for the rock-queen-for-a-night president to be celebrating ‘democracy’ at the same time that she was threatening to impeach the judges who had ignored her desire (order) to make good on her vendetta against Clarín—especially since one of the clearest signs that some vestige of democracy still exists in the country was the independence with which the courts shot down the administration’s plan to make what is basically an anti-trust suit into a popular conquest, and so sidestep a few stages in the due process of law.

But then again, maybe that was no more surreal than the 9D crowd’s being led in cheers and hurrahs for the ‘democracy’ of Castro’s Cuba and the ‘democracy’ of Chávez’s Venezuela. Nor was it any stranger than the fact that the vast majority of the members of that “spontaneous gathering” arrived pretty much all together on a veritable fleet of chartered buses—that couldn’t be hidden despite being parked a few blocks away from Government House—and carrying huge banners identifying their political and Kirchnerist labor affiliations.

Perhaps it would be a good idea if this were the last ‘spontaneous popular democratic outpouring’ for a while, in what has basically come down to the case of a government that does little more than spend the day plotting how to neutralize its enemies before its enemies neutralize it. Argentina can’t afford any more such extravaganzas, and neither can democracy.

    

HOSTILE TAKEOVERS CO-OP STYLE

Okay, let’s start from the premise that, by most US standards, I would probably be considered way left of center. In fact, just about any time I read a statement by Professor Noam Chomsky—perhaps America’s most eminent left-winger—regarding social ethics and values, I can barely contain my applause and find myself thinking, “Couldn’t have said it better myself!” (No surprise, since Professor Chomsky is, among many other things, one of the world’s foremost experts in linguistics). I mean I’m not talking armed-revolution Che Guevara leftist, but certainly far enough left that if the far-right choir boys like O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Beck were to read my comments, they might certainly refer to me as “a leftwing loon” (just as I might consider them overpaid mouthpieces for corporate fascism and pandering stooges to the me-first wealth-hoarders that comprise the nefarious upper one percent).

But here in Argentina, I’ve quite often been considered (accused of being) just the opposite, a “gorilón” (literally ‘big gorilla’), the term used to describe defenders of US-type political and economic ideals (the other catch-all term here for anything the slightest bit Yankee is “neo-liberal” and it is frequently spat out like a cuss word), which are widely considered to be synonymous with economic and cultural imperialism and overall exploitation of the working class. Gorilón is also the epithet attached to just about anyone who doesn’t toe the line of the majority Peronist Party, and certainly anyone who is an opponent of the current Kirchner regime. (Guilty as charged).

Somewhere in between these two caricature-like descriptions lies the truth about me. I am clearly liberal, but try, above all, to see each situation from an individual viewpoint and issue the most objective opinion I can, within the limits of “objectivity” that each person’s own background, education and life experience permit. Which is probably why, when I received an invitation from a Facebook friend to “like” a group that supports workers’ taking over bankrupt firms they once worked for and turning them into worker cooperatives, I was immediately in two (or more) minds about it. I couldn’t “like” it, but neither could I rule out situations in which I would consider it a positive possibility for serious consideration. What concerned me most was where the idea of how this might be done was coming from, and it was coming from my own backyard, in Argentina.

In her all-encompassing arrogance and lack of self-assessment, Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner, on more than one occasion, during her first term in office, suggested that Western leaders, including US President Barack Obama, might be taking their cue from her and her late husband (and president before her), Néstor Kirchner, in dealing with their own political and economic crises. Considering the state of impending and ongoing political and economic crisis which has accompanied her in the first year of her second term as a result of her autocratic, devil-may-care brand of governance, such suggestions seem ever more delusional, especially considering how legal insecurity in Argentina has grown in almost direct proportion to the Kirchner administration’s penchant for holding onto power at any cost.

In the trickle-down from that kind of contempt for the hard and fast rules of democracy regarding basic tenets of freedom and justice, one of the institutions that has suffered some serious blows—through land occupations, government takeovers, etc.—has been respect for private property.  So when I read that the international co-op group in question was, indeed (and incredibly) following the lead of cooperatives formed in Argentina after workers took over the installations of the bankrupt former employers, it set off alarm bells.   

What’s a Co-op? A cooperative (or co-op) is, simply defined, an independent association of people who decide to cooperate with each other for mutual benefit. Co-ops can act as non-profits in strictly social or cultural endeavors, but most often are economic institutions, nearly always based originally on some social need.

The idea of the cooperative is certainly nothing new. It’s basically a throwback to ancient tribal governance, in which so-called “primitive peoples” set up a cooperative order for their societies, a more or less (depending on the tribe) “pecking order” by which to allot jobs, duties, resources, etc., and so, maintain the peace, harmony and security of their social groups. Actual “trade” was largely external (‘non-domestic’), probably based on internal surplus and external requirements, and was for the mutual profit of the tribe. Or that is, at least, the popular anthropological theory. 

Eli Whitney, father of the Industrial Revolution

In more modern eras there have been hundreds of examples of cooperative-type social structures, but the one that is considered a classic early example of a highly successful co-op is the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers.  The Rochdale Society was established in England in 1844. Like the globalization, computerization and robotics trends that are today forcing so many downsized workers to have to seek other alternatives for making a living, the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution was doing the same thing to many of the manufacturing workers and artisans of those times. Also like many of the unemployed workers of today, who once thought their competencies would provide them with a way to make a good living for the rest of their lives, many skilled workers and tradesmen in the times of the Industrial Revolution also found themselves, all of the sudden, grossly underemployed and impoverished. The founding core of the Rochdale Society was made up of about thirty such workers around a third of whom were weavers downsized by the industrial age inventions of the likes of American Eli Whitney (1765-1825) and other stars of the industrialization era. (By the way, after inventing the cotton gin and a viable textile milling machine, Whitney himself got “downsized” through patent infringement and spent the rest of his days applying the idea of “interchangeable parts” that he had long championed to making standardized firearms and selling them to the US government for its Continental Army).

Like many other people put out of work by the newfangled equipment of the industrialization craze, the Rochdale Society wasn’t a union or guild bent on taking back what it had lost as a skilled labor force, but simply a cooperative group of individuals pooling their mental and (meager) financial resources to try and figure out how to survive in a world that had dealt them a raw and unappreciative hand. So their founding idea was a simple one: to combine their resources in such a way as to permit them to buy basic food items that they could no longer individually afford to purchase from middlemen. The method they finally struck upon was not only buying enough for themselves, but also enough to sell and thus pay for their own consumer needs. Each managed to scrape together £1.00 to buy into the venture, and, just before Christmas, opened a tiny shop with a very limited but affordable supply of sugar, butter, flour, oatmeal and candles to sell to the working public.

Why it Worked. First conceived as a mere survival tactic, the idea nevertheless quickly caught on in such a way as to make the Rochdale cooperative a sort of Industrial Revolution-style Mickey D’s. Within a very short time the co-op’s stores began to also stock more expensive high-quality items like tea and tobacco. And within a few short years, England saw the emergence of hundreds, and then, over a thousand cooperatives based on the Rochdale model.

The first Rochdale co-op store. Photo by Sacrletharlot69 via Wikipedia.

This was, however, no accident or mere stroke of luck. What was different about the Rochdale Society, in comparison with failed co-op ventures of earlier years, was that it had a strong “franchise model” based on a set of hard and fast rules for mutual cooperation that its founders laid down from the outset. These rules were called The Rochdale Principles. Some of the more salient premises of the Rochdale pact that survive today in what are considered sound bases for the establishment of successful co-ops include: open membership and general non-discriminatory treatment, motivation and rewards, democratic governance through member control, member economic participation, autonomy and independence in the co-op’s governance and operations, information transparency, provision of education and training to members, cooperation with other cooperatives, and general concern for the community.

Since that time co-ops of all kinds—from farming and electric power to finance and entrepreneurial—have been formed and have tended to have a better general track record for stability and endurance than any other type of business. Reliable studies have shown that the survival rate for new businesses in certain major economies beyond their first ten years is only about two in ten, while co-ops fair far better at four in ten. And what is, perhaps, most important about them is the self-determination that is at their core: They frequently—if not always—fill a need that neither business nor government has been willing or capable of filling. So it is that co-ops have brought such standard of living improvements as electric power, telecommunications, cheap financing and agricultural marketing and trade to segments of society which would otherwise have remained relegated to a more backward existence for much longer, because of where they ranked on the list of institutional priorities.

In my native United States, in the years since World War II, the Cold War Red Scare—in which anti-communist witch-hunts were rife—and the advent of extreme corporate capitalism and its unhealthy influence on government following the fall of the Berlin Wall, have often given cooperatives a bad rap, mostly because of paranoia about their being based  on the premise of economic democracy, which is all about fair distribution of wealth, and which is often erroneously equated with some sinister Marxist plot to destroy capitalism. It is actually a philosophy that has to do with taking economic decision-making out of the hands of a tiny élite of corporate shareholders and putting it into the hands of a much broader segment of real stakeholders, which makes it not the enemy of, but an alternative to a system that, of late, has shown serious signs of failure.

Pros and Cons. Anyway, enough with Co-ops 101: What we’re interested in here are worker cooperatives, in which, basically, an enterprise is owned and operated by those who actually produce what it makes. If that were the plan for a business starting from scratch in today’s highly entrepreneurial world, I would be all for it since, ideally, the cooperative system tends to foster a lot of things that big business is only just now learning about, after decades of arm-twisting and foot-dragging: things like cutting waste, assuming full accountability to the actual owners (the shareholders) and to the surrounding community, social commitment, respect for worker rights, social inclusion, product quality improvement for reasons other than increased profits and legal impositions, and so on, as well as the loyalty of the capital involved to the place where it is produced (i.e., a cooperative doesn’t just shut down operations in, say, Ohio or Texas, or North Carolina, in order to reopen them in a maquiladora  on the opposite side of the Río Grande, where it can get away with exploiting cheap labor, abysmal working atmospheres and much lower environmental standards. Nor does it have fat cat executives pulling down multi-million-dollar pay packages plus sumptuous perks at the top.

But that wasn’t the proposal that came my way via Facebook.

Working World. The cause I was requested to “like” by my Facebook friend was that of The Working World. And let me just say that, right off the bat, I was indeed tempted to click the LIKE button. The Working World describes itself as “a non-profit organization that provides investment capital and technical support for worker cooperatives using an innovative finance model.” The group explains how its model works as follows: “We support worker cooperatives using a finance model that puts money at the service of people, not the other way around. We help design, fund, and carry out productive projects, only requiring that cooperatives pay us back with the revenues the investments generate. As active partners, we are more motivated to ensure that these projects are successful, or in other words, that finance is only used as a tool to create real, lasting wealth for those that it serves. Upon return, all investment money is reintegrated to our locally-based revolving loan fund to be overseen by the cooperatives and the community it serves.”

So far, so good. But delving deeper into the little I could find out about the organization, I came across some articles regarding its work in the United States and the world. What particularly grabbed my attention was one posted by Steve Wong on the group’s blog in which he praised certain co-op operations that he had observed on a trip to Argentina to visit Working World affiliates (or potential affiliates). These were, according to the author of the article, “recovered businesses” which Wong describes as follows:  “For those who don’t know, the recovered businesses began as bankrupt companies that were occupied and reopened by workers after the Argentine economic crisis in 2001. While their paths have been difficult and fraught with challenges, as a movement these cooperatives have succeeded, going out of business less frequently than their traditional counterparts and serving as important anchors of employment in local communities throughout Argentina.”

The question here, however, isn’t whether or not the resulting worker co-ops have done a better job than their former employers in operating their businesses, but of how they got those businesses in the first place. And it is worthy of concern that The Working World seems to consider the Argentine “model” one that might well be worthy of replication elsewhere. “Occupation” models are a hallmark, for instance, of the current governing movement that has ruled the country for the past decade. And political as well as economic motives have been cited for at least one of the worker occupations that the group mentions: the fact that the factory in question was started in the late 1970s under the former military regime taking advantage of incentives the de facto government offered, and that its owner also took advantage of backing from the later democratic administration of Carlos Menem, the corruption and failed privatizations of which have made it a frequent target in the current administration’s efforts to buoy its own popularity levels.

But the point is not how inept or corrupt the former owners of occupied properties might have been. These are only sad or scandalous anecdotes in the process that led to their failure. What is indeed important is that any “model” that encourages the hostile takeover of private property is a dangerous precedent and one that can easily play into the power games of governments which don’t respect the law or the basic rules of democracy either.

Clearly, with what we know now about the kind of corporate corruption that has led to the world crisis that first broke in 2007, the rules of how business is done have to change. And this is also true of the noxious effects that globalization has fostered in terms of undermining worker rights and the democratic health of labor unions. But transformation needs to come through democratic channels, by encouraging, lobbying for, and demanding changes in the laws that govern business—with one such change being the placement of workers at the top of the list of a company’s creditors, so as to give them the legal clout necessary to negotiate such takeovers, while respecting the property rights of the former owner. If de facto takeovers of bankrupt businesses become the norm, then it is only one small step to businesses (and other sorts of private property) being snatched from their owners’ hands on the strength of any excuse at all, and that, to an autocratic populist government like Argentina’s current one, which has repeatedly demonstrated its bent for ignoring the law in this respect, would be a powerful temptation in dealing with its political enemies in business.